The Trial

The Old Bailey, 8 and 9 May 1701, though not an ordinary session of it. Kidd was tried at an Admiralty sessions held there under royal commission, on six indictments: one for murder, five for piracy. He faced two kinds of charge and they should be judged separately, because they rested on different evidence.

For the murder of William Moore: eyewitness testimony from men on the Adventure Galley's deck, tried first, on 8 May. For piracy, above all the taking of the Quedagh Merchant: the question of authority, which is to say the question of documents.

On the piracy side, Kidd's defence was the passes. The printed trial record shows they were never produced in court, that no witness would say he had seen one, and that Kidd told the court his papers had been taken from him by Bellomont. That courtroom absence is confirmed by the record itself. Whether the government still held the passes at that moment is held as highly probable, the full custody chain not yet established. What the record establishes directly is the outcome: guilty, on the murder and on every piracy count.

One detail belongs beside the verdicts. The two chief Crown witnesses were pardoned former crewmen, and the defence pressed that they were saving themselves. Kidd was hanged at Execution Dock on 23 May 1701.

The full charge sequence, the judge (Lord Chief Baron Ward), the witnesses and the timing of the verdicts are set out on the trial's own page, drawn from the printed 1701 trial record. The record is good on the verdicts. It is less good on everything the courtroom did not write down.