Hello Lornad
Joanne Boswell partnered John Burton, son of Ambrose Burton. The couple’s only child Levi Harry Burton was baptised at St John’s, Yeovil in 1799. Tryphena Boswell partnered Thomas Dicks aka Dix, a non- Gypsy born to farm labourers in the village of Calne, Wiltshire in 1779. It is likely the Boswell family made regular visits to this village throughout Dicks’ childhood to visit the grave of Joanne and Tryphena's probable uncle, Inverto Boswell, interned there in magnificent style in February 1774 after his death from small pox aged 36.
Thomas and Tryphena's first child was baptised at Calne, as Tryphena, daughter of Tryphena Boswell, ‘Reputed Father’ Thomas Dicks in November 1801. Belcher was born to them there circa 1804, doubtless like several Romany children that decade named in honour of James ‘Jem’ Belcher (1781-1811), the premier prize fighter in England. Belcher was followed by Sarah Dicks baptised at Seend, Wiltshire in 1806 as illegitimate daughter of Tryphena Dicks ‘One of those people called Gipsies’. On Boxing Day 1808 the couple were back at Calne where a further daughter Ann was baptised to them. Two years later, they were belatedly joined together in legal matrimony at Calne parish church, on 15th October 1810.
Six weeks after his marriage Thomas Dicks was arrested, in company with a James Dicks, presumably his brother, and Isaac Rose, and committed to Fisherton Anger Gaol charged with stealing a chilver lamb and some wearing apparel from Evereligh, Wiltshire. All three men were convicted and sentenced to death at the next January Assizes, but in May the sentences were commuted to a ‘very merciful’ two years for Thomas, and a year each for James and Isaac as his accomplices. After his release from gaol, in January 1813, he had at least one further child with Tryphena, a son Thomas Dicks, junior, baptised eighteen months later at Hilperton, Wiltshire in June 1814. Thomas was arrested again in Wiltshire in March 1828, with another Gypsy man, Nipton [i.e Neptune] Smith, and was described then as an ‘old offender’.
His son Belcher and nephew Levi as you know were transported for horse theft three years earlier, in 1825. They stole a bay mare and a black pony from adjacent farms at Cadbury, Somerset, on the evening of 1st July 1825, coincidentally, just two days after Levi's father John was discharged from Dorchester prison, Dorset, after he too had been arrested by warrant on suspicion of horse stealing on 27th June 1825. Within days the horses Levi and Belcher stole were traced to Everliegh, Wiltshire, where they had been hastily abandoned by the two cousins who were arrested close by hiding on Salisbury Plain near to Stonehenge. The prison records show Levi had already been publicly whipped and served three month imprisonment for a petty theft in Hampshire in September 1823. Belcher was described in the same records as a ‘Gypsy pedlar, twenty years old, born at Calne, Wiltshire, five feet five, with black eyes and black hair’.
Three weeks after arrest they were convicted and sentenced to death. According to the ‘Dorset County Chronicle’ as Levi was taken down the court steps to prison he wished aloud that the ‘judge’s head was chopped off’ and the same reports adds that both men ‘Belong to the desperate gang of Gipsies that bare their names’. The sentences were later commuted to life transportation, and together they were shipped from England on the ‘Sesostris’ in November 1825.
Levi's uncle Henry/Harry Burton was described as 'King of the Gypsies' in newspaper reports, both at the time of his burial and before, as was Harry's wife Dove Hearn. She had been arrested as a teenager in the 1770's travelling Dorset with her parents, sister, and Robert Boswell, the father of Joanne and Tryphena. Robert was buried at Loders, Dorset in 1806. He is simply described as a 'Gipsey' in the register, though newspaper reports from later in the century show a plaque had been placed to him there as 'King of the Gypsies', which had faded to nothing by the 1870's. Robert and his family's link to Calne 1780-1815, suggests he was close related to Inverto Boswell, and was probably also a son to Inverto's father, Henry Boswell, who was buried at Ickleford, Hertfordshire in 1780, similarly described in the register simply as a 'Gypsy', but remembered as a 'King of the Gypsies' in local legend.