Proficiency in them, witness the nice way he had found to cut asunder one of the Iron Bars in his Window in the Tower, by some small Instrument, scarce perceivable.”  It was on 4th August 1716 that Lord Wintoun made his escape, but, like everything else in his life, it is wrapped in obscurity.  For, according to the Diary of Mary Countess Cowper for 19th March 1716, the last day of his trial, “My Lord Winton had sawed an iron Bar with the Spring of his Watch very near in two, in order to make his Escape; but it was found out.”  So, possibly, there is something in the story told by the author of Rab and his Friends, that he was carried out of the Tower in a hamper, supposed to be full of family charters, by John Gunn, “the head of a band of roving gipsies.”  Anyhow, ever afterwards he lived at Rome, where in 1737 he was great master of the Lodge of Freemasonry.  He died unmarried, though Lady Cowper alleges “he has eight Wives.”

Charles Bosvile, the scion of a good old Yorkshire house, is another who must have known much about the Gypsies.  He was buried at Rossington, near Doncaster, on 30th January 1709; and more than a hundred years later the Gypsies would visit the churchyard, and pour out a flagon of ale on his grave by the chancel door. 

Joseph Hunter, the historian of South Yorkshire, tells how he had

“established a species of sovereignty among that singular people, the Gypsies, who before the enclosures frequented the moors round Rossington.  His word with them was law, and his authority so great that he perfectly restrained the pilfering propensities for which the tribe is censured, and gained the entire good-will for himself and his subjects of the farmers and people around.  He was a gentleman with an estate of about 200l. a year; and his contemporary, Abraham de la Pryme of Hatfield, describes him as ‘a mad spark, mighty fine and brisk, keeping company with a great many gentlemen, knights, and esquires, yet running about the country.’”

Bamfylde Moore Carew (1693-? 1770), the son of the rector of Bickleigh, near Tiverton, is semi-mythical, though we know that a man of that name did really marry at Stoke Damerel, near Plymouth, one Mary Gray on 29th December 1733.  Gray is an old Gypsy surname, but the Gypsies of his Life and Adventures are just as unreal as those of any melodrama or penny dreadful.

The poet-physician, John Armstrong (c. 1709-78), was at college at Edinburgh with Mr. Lawrie, who in 1767 was minister of Hawick; and “one year, during the vacation, they joined a band of gipsies, who in those days much infested the Borders.”  So says “Jupiter” Carlyle in his Autobiography; and he adds that “this expedition, which really took place, as Armstrong informed me

in London, furnished Lawrie with a fine field for fiction and rhodomontade, so closely united to the groundwork, which might be true, that it was impossible to discompound them.”

The fourth Lord Coleraine, better known as Colonel George Hanger (c. 1751-1824), was a wild, harum-scarum Irishman.  According to the Hon. Grantley Berkeley’s My Life and Recollections, “in one of his early rambles he joined a gang of gipsies, fell in love with one of their dark-eyed beauties, and married her according to the rites of the tribe.  He had entered the footguards in 1771, and used to introduce his brother-officers to his dusky bride, boasting his confidence in her fidelity.  His married life went on pleasantly for about a fortnight, at the end of which his confidence and his bliss were destroyed together, on ascertaining to his intense disgust that his gipsy inamorata had eloped with a bandy-legged tinker.”

Very unlike the Colonel was the mythologist, Jacob Bryant (1715-1804).  We know the little man, with his thirteen spaniels, through Madame D’Arblay’s Diaries; she often visited Cypenham, his house near Windsor.  It must have been in his garden here that he collected his materials for the paper “On the Zingara or Gypsey Language,” which he read to the Royal Society in 1785.  For “covascorook, laurel,” is intelligible only by supposing him to have pointed to a laurel, and asked, “What is this?” and by the Gypsy’s answering

in words that mean “This is a tree.”  There are a number of similar slips in the vocabulary, as sauvee, an eagle (rightly, a needle), porcherie, brass (a halfpenny, a copper), plastomingree, couch (coach), and baurobevalacochenos, storm.  This last word posed the etymological skill of even Prof. Pott in his great work on Die Zigeuner, but he hazards the conjecture that cochenos may be akin to the Greek χολη; really the whole may be dismembered into baúro, great, bával, wind, and the English “a-catching us.”  Still, Bryant’s is not at all a bad vocabulary.

Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton (1803-73), tells in a fragment of autobiography how at twenty-one he met a pretty Gypsy girl at sunset, was guided by her to the tents, and “spent with these swarthy wanderers five or six very happy days.”  He committed his money, fourteen pounds in all, to the care of the Gypsy grandmother, the queen of the camp, who “was faithful to the customs of the primitive gipsies, and would eat nothing in the shape of animal food that had not died a natural death”!  Mimy, the Gypsy girl, and he make passionate love, till at last she proposes “marriage for five years by breaking a piece of burnt earth.”  But the stars and the Gypsy brethren forbid the banns, so they part eternally.  It is all the silliest moonshine, the most impossible Gypsies: no, Bulwer Lytton deserves no place among the real Romany Ryes.

Of these a whole host remain.  Francis Irvine,

a lieutenant in the Bengal Native Infantry, on the outward-bound voyage (1805) to India on board the Preston East Indiaman, took down a vocabulary of one hundred and thirty Romany words from John Lee, a Gypsy recruit for the Company’s European force.  No other case is known to me of a Gypsy revisiting the land of his forefathers.  John Hoyland (1750-1831), a Yorkshire Quaker, in 1814 began to study “the very destitute and abject condition” of the Midland Gypsies, and wrote A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, and Present State of the Gypsies (York, 1816).  He is said to “have fallen in love with a black-eyed gipsy girl,” but it does not appear that he married her.  Which is a pity; a Gypsy Quakeress would be a charming fancy.  That poor thing, John Clare, the Peasant-Poet (1793-1864), is said to have “joined some gipsies for a time” before 1817; and Richard Bright, M.D. (1789-1858), famous as the investigator of “Bright’s disease,” must have known much of Gypsies both abroad and at home, to be able to write his Travels through Lower Hungary (1818).  James Crabb (1774-1851), Wesleyan minister at Southampton, and Samuel Roberts (1763-1848), Sheffield manufacturer, both wrote books on the Gypsies, but were Gypsy philanthropists rather than Romany Ryes.  Still, Roberts had a very fair knowledge of the language, and at seventy-seven “longed to be a gypsy, and enter a house no

more.”  Colonel John Staples Harriot during his “residence in North Hampshire in the years 1819-20 was led to pay considerable attention to a race of vagrant men, roaming about the high-roads and lanes in the vicinity of Whitchurch, Waltham, and Overton”; in December 1829 he read before the