Simon Bradstreet, age eighty-six, “and Lady,” his younger second wife, Anne, were present at the long dinner table. There were daughters of the late John Cotton and the late Edmund Quincy Sr.—Mary Cotton Mather, whose husband, Increase, was still in London, and Samuel’s widowed mother-in-law. The Reverend Cotton Mather and his wife were present, along with the Reverends Samuel Willard and Joshua Moody with their wives—representatives of all three of Boston’s churches. Major Elisha Hutchinson and his wife sat next to the Reverend James Allen, who preached at the church that had cast out Hutchinson’s grandmother. Thomas Brattle, a merchant who had been in London on colonial business during Samuel’s time there, sat nearby. Brattle, a mathematician, astronomer, and member of the Harvard class of 1676, was serving with remarkable effectiveness as the treasurer of the still-troubled college. His father, of the same name, had been a founding member, with John Hull, of the Third Church.
