Richard Bellings - Early Life

Early Life

Bellings was an Old English Pale gentleman. His grandfather, (also named Richard Bellings) was Solicitor-General for Ireland from 1574–1584, and was granted extensive lands by the Crown at Tyrrelstown, a suburb of Dublin in 1600. His father, Henry Bellings, served as Provost Marshal, and as High Sheriff of Wicklow County, where he campaigned against the O’Byrnes. Richard Bellings himself was trained as a lawyer at Lincoln's Inn, London, and afterwards served in the Irish Parliament. However in spite of this impeccably loyal background, Bellings, as a Roman Catholic, was banned from all public office. He later wrote that he resented the Protestant New English monopoly on, "places of honour, profit and trust" in the Irish government, that he, as a Catholic, was barred from. This resentment caused many Palesmen, including Bellings, to join the Irish Rebellion of 1641. However, Bellings later insisted that he and his peers joined the rising only out of self-defence, given the hostility of the English government in England and Ireland to Irish Catholics.

In October 1641, rebellion broke out in the northern province of Ulster, led by Gaelic Irish Catholic noblemen. Bellings and his contemporaries in the Pale did not immediately join the uprising, but were drawn into it by a number of events. Bellings in his history of the period cites his main reasons for joining the rebellion as; a refusal on the part of the authorities to arm the Catholic population to put down the rebellion or even in self-defence, the decision of the Lords Justices in Dublin to suspend the Irish Parliament and thus to avoid redress of Catholic grievances, and finally the victory of the insurgents at Julianstown, which brought the rebellion into the Pale and forced the Pale nobility to either join the Catholic rebels or to be treated by them as enemies. Bellings was among the Palesmen led by Viscount Gormanstown who signed pact with Phelim O'Neill and Rory O'Moore, the rebel leaders in early 1642.