Early Life
The details of Bellingham's early life are unclear, as few sources survive, and most post-assassination biographies of him included speculation as fact. Recollections of family and friends allow some details to be stated with confidence. Bellingham was certainly born in St Neots, Huntingdonshire, and later brought up in London, where he was apprenticed to a jeweller, James Love, at the age of fourteen. Two years later, he was sent as a midshipman on the maiden voyage of the Hartwell from Gravesend to China. There was a mutiny on board on 22 May 1787, which led to the ship running aground and sinking.
In 1794, a John Bellingham opened a tin factory on London's Oxford Street, but the business failed and he was declared bankrupt that March. It has not been definitely established that this is the same person. Bellingham certainly worked as a clerk in a counting house in the late 1790s, and around 1800 he went to Arkhangelsk in Russia as an agent for importers and exporters. He returned to England in 1802, and worked in Liverpool as a merchant broker. He married Mary Neville in 1803.
In the summer of 1804, Bellingham again went to Archangel to work for a short time as an export representative.
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