The East India Company, which had suffered greatly by Kidd’s depredations, and which had been refused[171] letters of marque to suppress piracy in the Indian Ocean, joined in the clamour, and petitioned that Captain Kidd “might be brought to speedy trial, and that the effects taken unjustly from the subjects of the Great Mogul may be returned to them as a satisfaction for their losses.” It was ruled at last that Kidd should be examined at the bar of the House of Commons, with the idea of “fixing part of his guilt on the parties who had been concerned in sending him on his expedition.” Kidd was accordingly brought to England and lodged first in the Marshalsea, the prison of the Admiralty Court, and afterwards committed to Newgate. It was rumoured that Lord Halifax, who shared the political odium of Lords Somers and Orford, had sent privately for Kidd from Newgate to tamper with him, but “the keeper of the gaol on being sent for averred that it was false.”[172] It is more probable that the other side endeavoured to get Kidd to bear witness against Lord Somers and the rest; but at the bar of the House, where he made a very contemptible appearance, being in some degree intoxicated, Kidd fully exonerated them. “Kidd discovered little or nothing,” says Luttrell. In their subsequent impeachment they were, notwithstanding, charged with having been Kidd’s accomplices, but the accusation broke down. Kidd in the mean time had been left to his fate. He was tried with his crew on several indictments for murder and piracy at the Admiralty sessions of the Old Bailey, convicted and hung.[173] He must have prospered greatly in his short and infamous career. According to Luttrell, his effects were valued at £200,000, and one witness alone, Cogi Baba, a Persian merchant, charged him with robbing him in the Persian Gulf of £60,000. No case was made out against the above-mentioned peers. Lord Orford set up in his defence that in Kidd’s affair “he had acted legally, and with a good intention towards the public, though to his own loss;”[174] and Lord Somers denied that he had ever seen or knew anything of Kidd. Hume sums up the matter by declaring that “the Commons in the whole course of the transaction had certainly acted from motives of faction and revenge.”