November 11th. Went not to Madam Winthrop's. This is the 2d Withdraw....
About the middle of December Madam Winthrop made a Treat for her Children; Mr. Sewall, Prince, Willoughby: I knew nothing of it; but the same day abode in the Council Chamber for fear of the Rain, and din'd alone upon Kilby's Pyes and good Beer.[12]
FOOTNOTES:
[10] From Sewall's "Diary," as published by the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1882.
Mrs. Winthrop was the widow of General Waite Still Winthrop, a son of John Winthrop, Governor of Connecticut, who was a son of John Winthrop, Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Her maiden name was Katharine Brattle. She had first married John Eyre, with whom she lived about twenty years, and by whom she had twelve children. She was born in 1664, and at the time of Sewall's courtship of her was fifty-six and he sixty-nine. General Winthrop and Mrs. Sewall had died a few years before within a month of each other. Madam Winthrop did not marry Judge Sewall, nor any one else. She died five years after the date of this courtship.
[11] A son of Madam Winthrop by her first marriage.
[12] In the following summer Judge Sewall made his addresses to an old friend of his, then a widow, Mrs. Ruggles, by whom he was rejected. In March of the next year he married Mrs. Mary Gibbs.