Richard Coote, Earl of Bellomont

No image of Bellomont is on display in this gallery; his part in the story is carried by the documents.

Bellomont appears twice in the Kidd story, once at each end.

At the beginning he helped organise the venture, one of the politically connected investors behind Kidd's commission. At the end, as a colonial governor in North America, he ordered Kidd's arrest. Both actions are documented in correspondence and official records.

That double role is the reason he matters. A man who backs a privateer and later arrests him is either correcting a mistake or protecting himself, and the surviving letters do not settle which. The Archives treats his documented actions as fact and his motives as interpretation, argued separately in the essay Captain Kidd: Political Fall Guy.

His full style, as his own proclamations print it, was Richard Earl of Bellomont, Captain General and Governour in Chief of His Majesties Province of New-York; before the earldom of 1689 he was Baron Coote of Coloony.

Bellomont's birth year is uncertain. Traditional accounts give 1636, while his 1680 marriage licence reportedly described him as about twenty-five, implying a birth around 1655.