“Wicked uncle, kidnapped heir, bastards, sudden death. Very gratifying,” pronounced the young novelist Patrick O’Brian in 1945 on reading a contemporary sketch of James Annesley’s life.1 The presumptive heir to five aristocratic titles and sprawling estates in Ireland, England, and Wales, Annesley was kidnapped from Dublin in 1728 at the age of twelve and shipped by his uncle to America. Only after twelve more years, as a servant in the backwoods of northern Delaware, did he successfully return to Ireland to bring his uncle, the Earl of Anglesea, to justice in one of the most sensational trials of the eighteenth century.
But was Jemmy, in fact, scion of the house of Annesley or, as his enemies insisted, the bastard son of a common house servant? And how, in an age bereft of paternity tests, fingerprint records, and DNA laboratories, could a prodigal who had been missing for over a decade hope to reclaim his birthright in a court of law?
This extraordinary tale has over the centuries inspired at least five novels, including Kidnapped (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering (1815). Set either in Ireland or Scotland, these narratives have invariably revolved around the dramatic abduction of a young heir for the purpose not of extorting ransom but of usurping the lad’s patrimony.2
The real-life ordeal of Jemmy Annesley is even more incredible, though historians, curiously, have all but ignored his strange saga. Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman, Return’d from a Thirteen Years Slavery in America… (1743) is easily dismissed as sentimental fiction—which was my instinctive reaction upon first reading it twenty-five years ago. But more recently, a stray reference to Annesley’s tribulations in an obscure English diary in Oxford’s Bodleian Library caused me to probe further, only to discover transcripts of court proceedings held in London as well as Dublin.3 And, too, along with newspaper reports, I located nearly four hundred legal depositions, largely pertaining to Jemmy’s youth, in the National Library of Ireland in Dublin and the National Archives outside London. Although few scraps of personal correspondence have survived, members of the Annesley family left a vast trove of legal documents in their wake. The sheer density of the depositions, many containing richly detailed recollections of rural Ireland, is stunning. Though of varying quality and length, they speak not only of the minutiae of everyday existence—the clothing, furnishings, and customs of lords and peasants—but also of the cadences of Irish life. More than that, the Dublin trial in 1743 was but one episode in an extraordinary family drama that unfolded on two continents over seven decades, to the fascination of the public on both sides of the Irish Sea. In the rough-and-tumble world of eighteenth-century Ireland, few aristocratic families could match the house of Annesley for venality or violence. “Surely this is melodrama and not history,” a distinguished legal scholar has quipped.4 The truth is that it is both.
The Annesleys, an English family who during the course of the 1600s achieved wealth and fame in Ireland on a grand scale, were scarcely the only noble house in either kingdom racked by internal discord. By the eighteenth century, many family dynasties, once united by bonds of kinship and clientage, had given way to nuclear households comprising parents, children, and a small ring of close relatives. Legal quarrels, especially rival claims over inheritance, were not uncommon among distant relations. “When kinsfolk are a degree or two removed, they grow perfectly indifferent to each other, and come to forget all mutual regards,” lamented a Dublin writer in 1734.5
But the Annesleys fought the bulk of their battles at close quarters. The ferocity of their clashes—over rank and wealth, rather than theology or political dogma—cut to the family’s very core, pitting husband against wife, father against son, and brother against brother. Jemmy’s abduction by his Uncle Dick was merely the most brazen act of treachery, neither the first nor, surely, the final breach of trust. Ultimately, this is a story about betrayal and loss—but also about endurance, survival, and redemption. Despite its English origins, it is, at its heart, an Irish tale.