Updated with a new preface, this study provides a comprehensive biography of Thomas Dunckerley. An eighteenth-century success story, Dunckerley rose from obscurity to a twenty-year-long career in the Royal Navy, the centerpiece of which was the famous Siege of Quebec. He retired from the navy to climb to the highest echelons of English Freemasonry, holding Grand Masterships and Provincial Grand Masterships across England and across Orders. He was a tender family man, an inspiring leader and heroic patriot. He also had a secret. When Dunckerley was in his forties, his mother left a deathbed confession of her seduction and adultery-and his illegitimacy. As Dunckerley revealed his mother's confession, his friends and Masonic colleagues were thunderstruck to discover he was not the son of a porter at Somerset House, but of the late King George II. For his contemporaries and biographers, all good things in his later career seemed to flow from this revelation. His mother's confession was not Dunckerley's real secret, however. What he actually hid, even from his wife of fifty years, was that the confession, the seduction, the hidden royal birth were all lies-so well-crafted that even now, more than two hundred years after his death, they are still held as Masonic gospel.

Ebenezer Sibly was a quack doctor, plagiarist, and masonic ritualist in late eighteenth-century London; his brother Manoah was a respectable accountant and a pastor who ministered to his congregation without pay for fifty years. The inventor of Dr. Sibly's Reanimating Solar Tincture, which claimed to restore the newly dead to life, Ebenezer himself died before he turned fifty and stayed that way despite being surrounded by bottles of the stuff. Asked to execute his will, which urged the continued manufacture of Solar Tincture, and left legacies for multiple and concurrent wives as well as an illegitimate son whose name the deceased could not recall, Manoah found his brother's record of financial and moral indiscretions so upsetting that he immediately resigned his executorship. Ebenezer's death brought a premature conclusion to a colorfully chaotic life, lived on the fringes of various interwoven esoteric subcultures. Drawing on such sources as ratebooks and pollbooks, personal letters and published sermons, burial registers and horoscopes, Susan Mitchell Sommers has woven together an engaging microhistory that offers useful revisions to scholarly accounts of Ebenezer and Manoah, while placing the entire Sibly family firmly in the esoteric byways of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Siblys of London provides fascinating insight into the lives of a family who lived just outside our usual historical range of vision.