Richard Bellings - The Confederate Politician

The Confederate Politician

Belling was one of the chief movers behind the creation of the Confederate Catholics of Ireland which sought to bring the anarchic rebellion under social control and to organise Irish Catholic armies in self defence. Bellings was voted onto the Supreme Council as secretary (the Confederation's executive branch) in 1642. However, Bellings, like his colleagues on the Supreme Council, was a conservative Confederate. Because of his Old English background, he had little time for the initial Ulster Irish rebellion. Also given his social standing, he detested social rebellion, calling it, "the violent fury of a rude and desperate multitude". He also strongly disapproved of the killing of Protestants in the early phases of the rebellion.

Bellings was a committed Royalist and was involved in negotiations with Ormonde - Charles I's representative in Ireland - to help the King in the English Civil War in return for political and religious concession to Irish Catholics. However, his critics argued that the Supreme Council were far too moderate in their demands and pointed out that many of them were actually related to Ormonde. In Bellings' case, this was true, he married Lord Mountgarret's daughter, and was thus related to the Ormonde dynasty and privy to the thinking of peers such as Ormonde himself, Mountgarret and Viscount Muskerry. Furthermore, in his capacity as secretary of the Supreme Council, he was also familiar with other aristocrats like Clanricarde and James Dillon, whose thoughts and actions during 1641-42 he recounts extensively in his history of the period. The Supreme Council's critics - mostly Gaelic Irishmen who allied themselves with Owen Roe O'Neill and later Giovanni Battista Rinuccini - were so alienated by the Supreme Council's failure to prosecute the Irish Confederate Wars successfully, that they began calling them "traitors" and "Ormondists".

Bellings spent 1644-45 as the Confederate's ambassador in continental Europe, visiting France, Spain and the Papacy to appeal for military or financial help. He returned in 1646 along with the Papal Nuncio Giovanni Battista Rinuccini. However, he was dismayed to find that Rinuccini rejected the Ormonde Peace treaty, that the Supreme Council had negotiated with the King. The Peace, although it abolished most of the civil restrictions on Catholics, did not guarantee public practice of Catholicism and offered no reversal of the confiscation of Catholic owned land. Under pressure from Rinuccini and the Catholic Bishops, the peace was voted down by the Confederate General Assembly.

Bellings and his colleagues, which included Peter Valesius Walsh, were temporarily arrested, but were released in time to conclude a new Omonde Peace with the Royalists in 1648. However, by this time it was too late to help the English Royalists and the English Parliament turned its attention on Ireland, re-conquering it in 1649-1653. See Also Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. Bellings managed to flee to the Royalist court in exile in France but his lands were confiscated in bulk by the Parliamentarians. In fact, they had been devastated in the wars anyway, as they lay directly on the route to Dublin taken by the contending armies.