As a matter of fact, it may well be doubted whether any of the grantees, excepting Kidd and Livingstone, lost any part of their expenses. As has already been shown, one of the conditions on which their legal advisers had been careful to insist had been that if the prize moneys were insufficient to make good the full amount advanced by the grantees, other than Kidd and Livingstone, the deficiency was to be made good by Kidd and Livingstone, both of them men of substance. We have seen with what eagerness, and with what disastrous results to Kidd, Livingstone had endeavoured to get his bond restored to him by Bellamont. That Kidd’s estate of itself, notwithstanding the fact that he was unable in Newgate to get funds for his defence until the night before his trial, was sufficient to have covered any loss sustained by the great men, who had exploited him, is clear from the fact that of his effects forfeited to the Crown, six thousand four hundred and seventy-one pounds were afterwards given by Queen Anne towards the establishment of Greenwich hospital.[14] But whether or not these great men found it inconvenient to reclaim their one thousand pounds apiece, it is impossible to doubt that when making this cruelly unjust charge of faithlessness against Kidd the day after his death, Somers was fully acquainted with the essential facts of the case. It is incredible that he had not read Kidd’s narrative, the depositions of his men, and Bellamont’s correspondence, and that he was not cognizant of all the proceedings at Kidd’s trial, the keeping back of the French passes by the Admiralty officials: the failure of Kidd’s counsel to put in an appearance on the critical day when he was tried for piracy; the break-down of the most material parts of the King’s evidence; and the manner in which the trials had been conducted throughout by the Lord Chief Baron. It is to be feared that he not only knew all this, but that his was the unseen master hand that had held the strings, which had been so skilfully and ruthlessly manipulated as to bring about Kidd’s death so opportunely by the verdicts of London juries. If this be so, what is to be said of the Whig historians, who have dealt with Kidd’s case? Is it possible to believe in the face of indisputably recorded facts, that Somers really was the immaculate politician of his day depicted for us by Macaulay, “whose integrity,” we have been assured, “was ever certain to come forth bright and pure from the most severe investigation”? In the foregoing pages an attempt has been made, it is believed for the first time, to allow the personages who took part in this melancholy business to speak for themselves, so far as the extant records permit. Hitherto by a conspiracy of silence, their voices have been hushed, and the facts of the case studiously suppressed or perverted by eminent advocates, who have thought it necessary, if the memories of Somers and his colleagues were to be cleansed from the stigma which