An uncle shipped his 12-year-old nephew to America as a servant to take the Anglesey titles, and a Dublin jury found for the nephew in 1743

Arthur Annesley, 4th Baron Altham, died in 1727. His son James, born in County Wexford in 1715, was heir to the Altham title and, through it, to the earldom of Anglesey and its Irish estates. In April 1728, aged about 13, James was transported to America on the orders of his uncle Richard Annesley, who took the titles. He was sold as an indentured servant to a plantation in Delaware^†. James escaped on his third attempt in 1740, reached Philadelphia, sailed to Jamaica and joined the Royal Navy. Back in England, a man named Thomas Egglestone was shot by accident at Staines on 1 May 1742. Richard's agent pressed a murder charge against James. The jury returned chance medley, an accidental killing. On 11 November 1743 James's ejectment suit against the earl opened before three Barons of the Exchequer in Dublin. The earl's case was that James was the son of a servant, Joan Landy. The trial ran to 25 November and the jury found for James. The earl was allowed a writ of error. A 1745 perjury prosecution of a witness, Mary Heath, ended in acquittal. The editor of the 1912 trial record wrote that the suit "remained undecided" and that the title and estates never came to James. He died on 5 January 1760 and was buried in an unmarked grave at Lee. Historian A. Roger Ekirch traced Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Kidnapped (1886) to the case.