The Catholic viscount opposes the legitimacy of King William III and is killed fighting for James II at the Battle of the Boyne.

Her husband is also kind to Esmond, but he is a hard-drinking man of limited intellect and sometimes crude manners, and this causes his wife a great deal of embarrassment.

Returning to England, now twenty-three, he becomes reconciled with his foster mother and visits his cousins: Frank (now the fifth viscount), an unintelligent but good-natured boy of seventeen, and Beatrix, not yet sixteen but already tall and beautiful.

Esmond's play is a flop and he turns to writing political pamphlets and letters supporting his Tory friends and abusing the Duke of Marlborough, against whom he bears a grudge, while favoring John Richmond Webb (who was Thackeray's great-great-great-uncle.)

Henry and his cousin Frank later join an unsuccessful (and unhistorical) attempt to restore James Francis Edward Stuart to the British throne.

"[1] However, American publisher and writer James T. Fields, in his autobiographical Yesterdays with Authors, said of the book, and of his friend Thackeray: To my thinking, it is a marvel in literature, and I have read it oftener than any of the other works.

One day, in the snowy winter of 1852, I met Thackeray sturdily ploughing his way down Beacon Street with a copy of Henry Esmond (the English edition, then just issued) under his arm.

[4] Ippolito Nievo's novel Confessions of an Italian shows similarities with The History of Henry Esmond, in the fundamental structure of the plot, in the psychological outlines of the main characters, in frequent episodes, and in the use of metaphors.

Although popularised by British architects George Devey and Richard Norman Shaw, the anachronistic "Queen Anne" design style created in the latter part of the 19th century, for both buildings and furniture, won its Victorian nomenclature via readers' enthusiasm for Thackeray's detailed descriptions of that period in Henry Esmond.