In those days colonial governorships were less sought after than they are now; and it was hopeless to expect any man of mark at home to accept one. From an “Account of the proceedings in relation to Captain Kidd in two letters from a Person of Quality to a kinsman of the Earl of Bellamont,” published in 1701, the year of Kidd’s death, with the avowed object of vindicating the memory of Bellamont, who was then dead, it appears that New York had at that time, rightly or wrongly, earned a bad name in England. These letters, which so far as they appeared to whitewash Bellamont and Kidd’s other employers, were eagerly accepted and embellished by Macaulay, are historically interesting from the side lights which they throw on certain differences which had then arisen between England and her American Colonies, and were already paving the way for the separation of the Mother Country and her strongest child. Their writer begins by informing his readers that “it was then well known that for several years two very pernicious things had been growing up in our American Colonies,--an unlawful trade in fraud of the Acts of Navigation and the Plantations, infinitely prejudicial to England, and the cursed practice of piracy, utterly destructive of all commerce.” “Many,” he tells us, “were insensibly drawn into these ill courses by observing what excessive wealth the offenders gained in a short time, and with what impunity they offended. For some Governors, having found a way to share in the profit, were obliged not only to connive at, but protect, the offenders.” This anonymous gentleman had often, he says, been told by Bellamont that His Majesty had done him the honour to say “that he thought him a man of resolution and integrity, and with these qualifications, more likely than any other he could then think of” (apparently from Bellamont’s own account of the interview the King had not much time to waste in troubling himself about so unimportant a matter), “to put a stop to that illegal trade and to the growth of piracy, for which reason he had made choice of him as Governor of New York, and for the same reason intended to put the government of New England into his hands.”