Published in 1853, 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 an 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.