[4] In 1740, after about 12 years working as an indentured servant, James escaped from the plantation (his third attempt) and made his way overland to Philadelphia where he took passage on a merchant ship to Port Royal in Jamaica.

Richard, de facto Lord Altham, used that death to try to have James hanged for murder, but was unsuccessful due to last-minute testimony that the event was an accident.

Richard failed to pay his attorney in that attempted successful prosecution, and that failure lead to testimony in the following case in which major precedents were set regarding modern attorney/client privilege.

Eventually, James returned to Ireland where he laid claim to his birthright by means of the famous case of Annesley v Anglesea,[4] with the help of the Scottish Barrister Daniel Mackercher.

Eliza Haywood's novel Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman (1743) was published before the major trial, and narrates a wildly inaccurate imagining of James' life in the American Colonies.

It is stated that the story of James Annesley inspired Sir Walter Scott in writing Guy Mannering (1815), though the author never claimed such directly.

[8] The Johnsonian scholar and mystery writer Lillian de la Torre extensively researched unpublished documents in Ireland in the early 1960s, but her long projected book still remained in manuscript at the time of her death.

As Ekirch writes: It is inconceivable that Stevenson, a voracious reader of legal history, was unfamiliar with the saga of James Annesley, which by the time of Kidnapped’s publication in 1886 had already influenced four other 19th-century novels, most famously Sir Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering (1815) and Charles Reade’s The Wandering Heir (1873).