[1] Shortly after the start of the Civil War, he was "disabled" from sitting in the Long Parliament as he had joined the Royalist cause.

[1] On 4 February 1665 Samuel Pepys recorded an anecdote about Belasyse's civil war activities in a diary entry:[4] To my office, and there all the morning.

He told us another odd passage: how the King, having newly put out Prince Rupert of his Generallshipp upon some miscarriage at Bristol, and Sir Rd.

So the Prince, in all his fury and discontent, withdrew, and his company scattered – which they say was the greatest piece of mutiny in the world.Belasyse is considered to have been one of the first members of the Sealed Knot, a Royalist underground organisation,[3] as was Sir Richard Willis, his predecessor as Governor of Newark.

Belasyse was said to have been designated Commander-in-Chief of a supposed "Popish army" by the Jesuit Superior-General, Giovanni Paolo Oliva, but Charles II, according to Von Ranke, burst out laughing at the idea that this infirm old man, who could hardly stand on his feet due to gout, would be able even to hold a pistol.

However, Colman in fact seems to have been guilty of nothing more than indiscreet correspondence with the French Court in which he outlined his wildly impractical schemes for the advancement of the Catholic faith in England.

The impeached Catholic peers, though they endured a long imprisonment in the Tower, where Lord Petre died in 1683, were never brought to trial, apart from Stafford, who was executed in December 1680.

The marriage was forbidden by Charles II, who told his younger brother that "it was too much that he had played the fool once (i.e. by marrying Anne Hyde, another commoner) and that it was not to be done a second time and at such an age".