Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped...The true story

Published on Thursday 4 March 2010 19:08

'WICKED uncle, kidnapped heir, bastards, sudden death. Very gratifying," the aspiring young novelist Patrick O'Brian reflected in 1945 on first reading of the sensational ordeal of James Annesley.

• James Annesley was kidnapped and shipped to Delaware to work as a servant. Picture: Complimentary

The presumptive heir to five aristocratic titles and sprawling estates in Ireland, England and Wales, Annesley had been abducted from Dublin in 1728, at the age of 12, and shipped by his uncle Richard to America. Only after 12 more years as a servant did he successfully escape, returning to Ireland to bring his blood rival, now the Earl of Anglesea, to justice in one of the epic legal struggles of the 18th century.

No saga of personal hardship so captivated the British public in the 18th century as Annesley's turbulent life. It was talked about in coffeehouses and sitting-rooms on both sides of the Irish Sea for decades following his return.

This extraordinary tale inspired as many as five 19th-century novels, including Sir Walter Scott's Guy Mannering in 1815. But the most celebrated work of fiction to draw on Annesley's life was the classic adventure Kidnapped, published in 1886.

Robert Louis Stevenson never evidently acknowledged his debt to Annesley's saga, but it is inconceivable he was unfamiliar with the details. Not only was he a member of the Scottish bar, but beginning in his adolescence Stevenson became a voracious reader of history, literature and the law and was no stranger to Thomas Bayly Howell's Complete Collection of State Trials…, which included the Dublin trial in 1743 in which Annesley first sought to reclaim his birthright. Stevenson was also well acquainted with Scott's Guy Mannering. The literary magazine Chamber's Journal even published a long article devoted to Annesley's hardships in 1875.

This is not to diminish the obvious significance to Kidnapped of events in Scotland in the aftermath of the Jacobite uprising of 1745 – notably the Appin murder in 1752, in which a government estate agent, Colin Roy Campbell, was shot in the back by an unknown marksman.

But just as clearly, Annesley's ordeal afforded a template for Kidnapped, which described the dramatic abduction of a fatherless heir by a villainous uncle for the purpose of usurping the lad's patrimony. Then, too, both youths, James Annesley and David Balfour, were consigned to servitude in the American colonies, though the fictional Balfour manages to escape after his ship wrecks off the coast of western Scotland, and ultimately he succeeds in reclaiming his inheritance.

To Stevenson's contemporaries, there was no doubt of Kidnapped's provenance. In 1886, a critic wrote in the Athenaeum, London's pre-eminent literary magazine, "Of both Guy Mannering and Kidnapped the main action was suggested by the Annesley case, that marvellous romance of real life… And no doubt it may be said that in (David] Balfour's struggle with old Ebenezer there is nothing so improbable as the real struggle of Annesley with his wicked uncle, and that Annesley's adventures in the plantations… surpass in wonderfulness any of the chances, escapes and disasters that befell Balfour."

That claim, to say the least, is debatable in light of Balfour's rip-roaring adventures depicted by Stevenson. Even so, Annesley's real-life exploits were not lacking for excitement.

The truth is that it is both, as I recount in Birthright: The True Story that Inspired Kidnapped, researched with the aid of newspaper accounts, trial transcripts and nearly 400 legal depositions discovered in the National Library of Ireland in Dublin and the National Archives outside London.

No author could wish for a more gripping tale or extraordinary cast of characters, from a brave Dublin butcher and a warm-hearted Scottish merchant, to King George II. Centre stage is dominated by members of the house of Annesley, an English family who during the course of the 1600s had, like other Protestant adventurers, achieved wealth and fame in Ireland on a grand scale. Owing, however, to high rates of infant mortality, the family's honours and estates, rather than descending directly on the main stem of the genealogical tree, stood to fork sideways to a remote bough inhabited by Arthur Lord Altham, an impoverished baron and James Annesley's father.

In 1708, 19-year-old Altham had abandoned his wife Mary in London and absconded to Ireland, where he owned land in County Wexford, 70 miles south-west of Dublin. A short, homely man of slight build with grey eyes and black eyebrows, he delighted in low pleasures, best expressed upon offering a servant employment. "If you come to live with me," promised the baron, "you shall never want a shilling in your pocket, a gun to fowl, a horse to ride, or a whore." (The offer was accepted.)

In time, Altham reconciled with his wife long enough to guarantee the birth of a male heir, Jemmy as he was first called, in 1715. Three years later, after falsely charging her with adultery, the baron sent Mary off in a coach, never to return. "It's true she bore him," he later stormed, "and that's all the pleasure she shall have of him."

On taking a mistress, Sally Gregory, Lord Altham became deeply indebted to her and to numerous other creditors. Not only was he shortly charged with corruption by the Irish House of Lords, but he turned eight-year-old James out to fend for himself on the streets of Dublin, which the youth successfully did for three years as a shoeblack and errand boy. When taken to task for abandoning his son, the baron blamed Miss Gregory. "That bitch," he protested, "will not suffer me to do any thing for him." Despite Altham's mysterious death in 1727 at 38, no-one felt sufficiently troubled to investigate the circumstances.

But the central protagonists of the story are James, the orphaned son, and his uncle Richard, Lord Altham's younger brother, who in addition to being a serial bigamist was, if anything, more rapacious, the consequence perhaps of being a younger son with neither rank nor financial security. Owing to his unsavoury appearance and bad character, a female acquaintance later volunteered: "I would not have had him if I was young, no, not (even] to be a countess."

Just three weeks before the baron's death in November 1727, Richard had paid James a visit at the home of John Purcell, a good-natured butcher who, together with his wife, had taken the boy into their Dublin home just north of the River Liffey. Do you, Richard asked the butcher, have a boy in the house named James Annesley? Yes, replied Purcell, calling the lad from the fireside. Stricken with fear, his eyes beginning to moisten, Jemmy whispered to "Mammy", Purcell's wife, "That is my Uncle Dick."

The boy's fears were well founded. Shortly after having his brother poisoned, Richard removed this final obstacle to Altham's title, along with four additional peerages that his nephew stood to inherit from an elder cousin. On 30 April, 1728, James was grabbed in Dublin's Ormond market, bundled into a coach, transported to a quay alongside the River Liffey and carried aboard a vessel, brimming with servants, that was bound for Newcastle, Delaware.

Unlike David Balfour's successful escape in Kidnapped, Annesley was less fortunate, toiling for 12 years for a succession of masters in the backwoods of northern Delaware. That he survived was a testament to his resilience, however punishing the ordeal or wrenching his separation from Ireland. Unlike immigrants who sought to make new lives in the colonies, he held fast to his identity as his father's rightful heir.

Upon James's flight – successfully absconding on his third attempt – first to Philadelphia, then to Jamaica, London, and finally to Ireland, Richard, now the sixth Earl of Anglesea, repeatedly tried to have him killed as the two commenced a struggle, lasting two decades in and out of court. Never before had five peerages and such an immense estate been at the disposal of the legal system. By one account, the property was worth at least 50,000 a year, roughly comparable in today's prices to more than 5,000,000. In Kidnapped, by contrast, Balfour loses to his uncle a far more modest estate, located west of Edinburgh, that includes the House of Shaws, a large but decrepit mansion.

No less momentous in the public mind were allegations of aristocratic skulduggery, which, for James's following, had robbed a peer of the realm of his birthright and broken the chain of succession within the house of Annesley.

Richard's circle, by contrast, bewailed the prospect of elevating a false claimant to the family's hereditary honours, not unlike Jacobite efforts to place a Stuart heir on the throne. Opponents commonly derided James as a "pretender", the slur attached to successive generations of Jacobite claimants.

Annesley's contest, claimed Viscount Perceval in a letter to his father, was "perhaps of greater importance than any tryall ever known in this or any other kingdom".

As to whether the young claimant, like David Balfour, finally achieved justice, suffice to say that it is a tale full of unforeseen twists and turns that persisted well after the deaths of both James and his treacherous uncle. "Revenge," according to an old proverb, "is a dish that is best served cold" – even from the grave.