Kidd seems to have been born in Scotland and to have spent the greater part of his life in the American Colonies, neither of which circumstances was likely to stand him in good stead, either with the great men who employed him or with the London juries, by whom he was found guilty of murder and piracy. It is not alleged by his detractors that he had not borne an excellent character, until he was sent on his wild-goose chase after pirates, nor is there any reason to believe that he had any taste himself for piracy. On the contrary, it was his exemplary past conduct in this respect, in which he was certainly in advance of his time, which was the primary cause of his ruin, inasmuch as it induced the Earl of Bellamont, the Governor of New England, at the instigation of a local magnate, Colonel Livingstone, to select him as the most fitting instrument for the furtherance of the King’s alleged designs for the suppression of piracy, when at the mature age of fifty-two, he was living a reputable sea-faring life in easy circumstances, possessed of a ship of his own, and married to a wife with a considerable fortune, settled in New York. Bellamont was appointed Governor of New York by His Majesty King William the Third, early in the year 1695. Two years before he had been treasurer and receiver general of the late Queen Mary; but she had found it impossible to allow him to retain that post. In her diary of 1693 she writes: “Lord Bellamont behaved himself impertinently. I turned him out and was censured for it by all, which was no small vexation to me. But I could not be convinced that I was in the wrong, yet was sorry it was so understood.” That he was given to taking unjustifiable action on ill-grounded suspicions would appear from the fact that in the same year (1693) he had made himself ridiculous by a vexatious and abortive impeachment of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, Lord Coningsby, and one of the Irish Lord Justices, Sir Charles Porter, both of whom he had arraigned for high treason and other imaginary crimes and misdemeanors. The House of Commons, to whom he had presented his articles of impeachment, could not stomach proceedings so obviously calculated to bring it into contempt; and unanimously decided that the great majority of his accusations were absolutely groundless, while they declined to take any action on the remainder, considering the state of Ireland at the time when the alleged breaches of the law had taken place. It is of course impossible to say with certainty how far his ineptitude on this occasion, and the remembrance of the Queen’s dislike to the man, induced the King to offer him a colonial governorship. But he would be a bold man who would venture to deny that even in more modern times similar appointments have been offered to and accepted by men, whom their own party have found it convenient to rid Parliament of at any cost, without regard to the interests of the Colonies to which they have been relegated.