Restoration
After the English Restoration, Bellings was rewarded by Ormonde, (now Lord Deputy of Ireland) for his loyalty to the Royalist cause by being one of the few Confederates to recover their confiscated estates in the Act of Settlement 1662. In later life, he wrote a several volume history of the 1640s, called The Confederation and War in Ireland. Bellings’ account was written in the 1670s, from the perspective of a sound royalist, whose property had been recovered after the Restoration. He therefore presented the rebellion as a tragic accident caused by the King’s untrustworthy ministers, and which was joined only reluctantly, and under extreme provocation, by him and his fellow Palesmen and Irish nobles. Although Bellings is often considered a typical Old Englishman, he considered himself Irish and his writings show a good familiarity with Irish Gaelic, including the Old Irish texts such as the Lebor Gabála Érenn. Following his death in 1677, his body was carried to Mulhuddart, near Dublin, to be interred near his wife. His tomb, which was enclosed by a wall has no inscription visible upon it.
His son, another Richard Bellings gained fame as the secretary to Catherine of Braganza
Read more about this topic: Richard Bellings
Famous quotes containing the word restoration:
“Men who are occupied in the restoration of health to other men, by the joint exertion of skill and humanity, are above all the great of the earth. They even partake of divinity, since to preserve and renew is almost as noble as to create.”
—Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] (1694–1778)
“In comparison to the French Revolution, the American Revolution has come to seem a parochial and rather dull event. This, despite the fact that the American Revolution was successful—realizing the purposes of the revolutionaries and establishing a durable political regime—while the French Revolution was a resounding failure, devouring its own children and leading to an imperial despotism, followed by an eventual restoration of the monarchy.”
—Irving Kristol (b. 1920)
“The King [Charles II] after the Restoration accused the poet, Edmund Waller, of having made finer verses in praise of Oliver Cromwell than of himself; to which he agreed, saying, that Fiction was the soul of Poetry.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)