The History of Henry Esmond, Esq.: A Colonel in the Service of Her Majesty Queen Anne William Makepeace Thackeray

The History of Henry Esmond is a historical novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, originally published in 1852. The book tells the story of the early life of Henry Esmond, a colonel in the service of Queen Anne of England. A typical example of Victorian historical novels, Thackeray's work of historical fiction tells its tale against the backdrop of late 17th- and early 18th-century England — specifically, major events surrounding the English Restoration — and utilizes characters both real (but dramatized) and imagined. William Thackeray's novel is set in the reign of Queen Anne and follows the troubled progress of a gentleman and an officer in Marlborough's army as he wrestles with his allegiance to the old Tory-Catholic England until, disillusioned, he comes to terms of a kind with the Whiggish-Protestant future. Orphaned in the England of the later Stuarts, Henry Esmond is raised by his aristocratic, Jacobite relatives the Castlewoods. As a young man he falls in love with both Lady Castlewood and Beatrix, her beautiful, headstrong daughter, and is inspired to join the ultimately unsuccessful campaign to reinstate James Stuart to the throne. The book is written in the form of memoirs of Henry Esmond who was a settler of Virginia in the early 1700's. Thackeray valued Henry Esmond more than any of his other novels and it displays many of his own memories and emotions. William Makepeace Thackeray was an English novelist of the 19th century. He was famous for his satirical works, particularly Vanity Fair, a panoramic portrait of English society. Edward Jeffrey Irving Ardizzone was an English artist, writer and illustrator, chiefly of children's books.