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As yarns go, it pretty much has it all. There's a street waif who's actually an aristocrat, heir to half a dozen titles and estates in England, Ireland and Wales. A dastardly uncle who'll stop at nothing to usurp him. A kidnapping most foul, and a decade of toil as an ­indentured servant in 18th-century America. Then, against impossible odds, a dashing return, and a quest for justice through the courts that held all society spellbound.

The extraordinary story of James Annesley has inspired at least five novels, including Sir Walter Scott's Guy Mannering and, most famously, Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped, one of the best-loved adventure books of all time. Yet the true story behind a case that was in its day every bit as sensational as those of Oscar Wilde, Myra Hindley or OJ Simpson were in theirs has never fully been told – and it is, if anything, even more spectacular than the fictions spun around it.

"I think one reason why there's been so little recent interest in the Annesley saga is that many modern historians and literary critics simply have not considered it to be true," says Roger Ekirch, an award-winning American historian whose impeccably researched yet rip-roaring rendering of ­Annesley's life, Birthright, is published this month. "People were just not ­inclined to believe it. That was certainly my take, for a long time."

Ekirch and his fellows could be forgiven. The principal source of ­information on Annesley was a ­fanciful if much-reprinted volume from 1743, Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young ­Nobleman ("Return'd," the title ­continues in classic 18th-century ­plot-spoiling style, "from Thirteen years Slavery in America, where he had been sent by a Wicked Contrivance of his Cruel Uncle; A Story founded on Truth, and address'd equally to the Head and Heart").

The events related in the book ­appear so far-fetched, however, that most of those who have read it, says Ekirch, "have tended to dismiss it as merely a sentimental fiction, written during an age when overblown stories of impossible adventures were a ­popular literary genre".

But then the historian ­happened across an obscure diary by an 18th-century Somerset rector that cited, as the event that had most marked the year 1743, a trial in which a young claimant who had returned unexpectedly from abroad sued his uncle for a lost inheritance. "It rang a bell," Ekirch says. "It sent me back to the Memoirs."

And after seven years spent with trial transcripts, family documents, newspaper reports, House of Lords records and a treasure trove of nearly 400 legal depositions unearthed in Dublin and at the National Archives in Kew, it is now clear to Ekirch that those Memoirs are, essentially, true. "Annesley wasn't the author, but he was the source of the ­information," he says. "You don't have to dig far to substantiate it."

So who was James – or Jemmy – Annesley? He was born at Dunmain, County Wexford, in the spring of 1715, into Ireland's privileged, powerful and often dissolute Protestant aristocracy. Even in such company, the Annesleys were a particularly unprincipled lot, says Ekirch: "I seriously doubt whether any family could rival them in venality or violence."

But they were wealthy. Jemmy, son of Arthur, Baron Altham, and Mary, illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Buckingham, was putative heir to a family fortune that included two English peerages – one of them the prized earldom of Anglesea – and lands whose rental income alone would be worth, by the time he came to claim them, £50,000 a year: maybe £5m today.

His adventures began young. The boy was barely two when Altham threw Jemmy's mother out of ­Dunmain on a pretext. Father and son embarked on a nomadic and ­increasingly impecunious existence; at six, Jemmy was riding a small sorrel mare and sporting a scarlet silk coat with silver buttons, but the following year Altham, short of cash as long as his elder cousin, the current Earl of Anglesea, was alive, took up with a wealthy heiress "as much", says Ekirch, "out of self-­preservation as of passion".

Resented by his father's new mistress, Jemmy was beaten and eventually banished from the home. He became "a street urchin" in Dublin, says Ekirch. "For four years he worked as a shoeblack and ran errands for ­Trinity College students." Often he slept rough, before landing up, in the ­summer of 1727, at the home of a kindly butcher named John Purcell.

Enter – with suitably ­menacing drum roll – Altham's younger brother and Jemmy's uncle, Richard. He saw only two obstacles between himself and the Earl of Anglesea's lands and title: Altham and Jemmy. "In 30 years of writing history," says Ekirch, "Uncle Dick is the most sinister person I've ever encountered. His chaplain said of him later that no man was more penitent at the time of his death. Frankly, few men had more to be penitent about."

Indeed, Ekirch is now more or less sure that Richard, a serial bigamist, did Altham in. "I've become progressively convinced he poisoned his brother," the historian says. "He had the ­motive. The symptoms Altham displayed strongly suggest poisoning. And from later court documents we know that Richard visited the butcher Purcell just three weeks before Altham's death – plainly to find out whether Jemmy was ever likely to claim his title. The butcher told him he hoped Jemmy would be reunited with his father: the last thing Richard wanted to hear."

Altham, in any event, died on 15 November 1727. Richard was at the funeral, as – in tattered breeches and a filthy coat – was a distraught Jemmy, still only 12. Soon after, strange men ­began hanging around Purcell's yard. The butcher saw off one lot with his cudgel. But the following April, Jemmy was seized in Ormond Market, accused of "stealing a silver spoon", and led by Uncle Dick to George's Quay and a waiting longboat. He was rowed out to a ship (called, almost unbearably, the James), kidnapped and America-bound.

Wicked Uncle Dick had to wait 10 years before the redoubtable Earl of Anglesea finally expired. Nor did he enjoy the fruits of his plotting for long: after 12 miserable years as an indentured servant in the backwoods of Delaware, Jemmy regained his freedom in 1740. Now 25, he found passage on a merchant ship bound for London via Jamaica, and – war with Spain having broken out in the Caribbean – enlisted as an able seaman on arrival at Port Royal. There he also made his true identity known and, in one of this story's many stranger-than-fiction moments, was instantly recognised by several fellow sailors, including one who had been at school with him.

The news burst like a bomb in London and Dublin. Amid the back numbers of the London Daily Post, Ekirch found a breathless report dating from 12 February 1741, announcing that in Jamaica had been found a recently recruited seaman, "the only son of the late Lord Altham, who was heir to the title and estate of the Earl of Anglesea".

In London by September of that year, James could now embark on the battle to reclaim his birthright. ­Before it could even begin, however, he found himself accused of murder in a sensational trial at the Old Bailey that was manipulated from start to finish by his scheming uncle, who confided to a friend that if Annesley hanged he "should be easy in his titles and estates".

Safely acquitted by 1742, James had assembled enough witnesses in Ireland to bring a test case against his uncle. First he would need a pretext to prove his identity and stake his claim. A tenant for 1,800 acres of disputed land in County Meath was installed by James and, as expected, instantly evicted by Richard's agents. Dirty Dick was by now fighting mean: James faced two clear attempts on his life before the trial of the century came to court in November 1743.

Press and public interest on both sides of the Irish Sea was immense. At stake, after all, were five peerages, and the largest estate ever to be contested in a court of law. A string of witnesses swore Annesley was who he said he was, and that his story was true; his kidnappers made a full confession. But many more witnesses, often in Uncle Dick's pay, perjured themselves ­shamelessly, declaring James the ­bastard son of his wetnurse, the memorably named Juggy Landy.

"It was extraordinary," says Ekirch. "It shocked me, reading the documents. Seldom, if ever, can so many people have lied so brazenly and with such ­apparent conviction in a court of law." Finally, at the end of what was at the time the longest trial ever heard in the British Isles, the jury found for the tenant, thus confirming Annesley's identity. Even that, though, wasn't the end. James, whose funds were limited, could now sue in Dublin and London to recover his full birthright – but Richard played every delaying tactic in the book.

The affair dragged on for 15 long years. In April 1759, James was reduced to petitioning for his case to be heard as a pauper. Before it could be, on 5 January 1760, he died, to be followed a year later by his nemesis Uncle Dick, and a year after that by Annesley's only son. The press, says Ekirch, went overboard: Annesley, a "most remarkable and unfortunate man" who had "engrossed the attentions of three kingdoms more than any private man ever did", had surely died "of a broken heart", "truly a victim of the avarice, inhumanity and injustice of others".

The saga was finally concluded only in the 1770s, when, in a final flurry of lawsuits, Richard's bigamy (­"irregular and immoral way of life", it was called) was at last exposed. There was, the House of Lords' Committee of Privileges announced, no legitimate heir to his ill-gotten titles: the earldom of Anglesea was extinct. This was not the predictable, anti-climactic ending that Ekirch, when he set out on the story, says he most feared, but "a bittersweet one, full of poetic justice. It truly bears out that old French adage: Revenge is a dish best served cold".

There is no doubt, says Ekirch, that Stevenson's Kidnapped, published in 1886, was inspired by the Annesley story. "The setting is Scotland, and David Balfour never makes it to America," he says. "But it's the usurpation of an orphan's inheritance by a wicked uncle who conspires to send his nephew to the colonies as a servant. You couldn't get a much better dovetail than that. And we know for a fact that Stevenson read about the case." A number of other 19th-century novels, such as Charles Reade's The Wandering Heir, echo James's life even more closely.

No wonder. Here, says Ekirch, "was a real life drama that arguably no ­novelist could imagine, and if they did, it would be so incredible that even as fiction no one could possibly take it seriously."

The historian's one regret is that so little of that story – apart from the testimony he gave at his murder trial – survives in Jemmy's own words. He left no diaries, few papers. The key details of James Annesley's life, nonetheless, are now known beyond reasonable doubt, and it remains "a quite extraordinary saga of betrayal and loss, but also of survival, resilience and redemption," Ekirch says. "This is not just a story about 18th-century England and Ireland, but about the iniquities and virtues of human nature."

Birthright: the True Story that Inspired Kidnapped is published by Norton on February 25, price £17.99.

Read more about Robert Louis Stevenson.theguardian.com/books/robert-louis-stevenson

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