He is best known for his participation in Confederate Ireland, a short-lived independent Irish state, in which he served on the governing body called the Supreme Council.
His grandfather, (also named Richard Bellings) was Solicitor-General for Ireland from 1574–1584, and was granted extensive lands by the Crown at Tyrrelstown (now a suburb of Dublin) in 1600.
Bellings was among the Palesmen led by Viscount Gormanstown who signed a pact with Phelim O'Neill and Rory O'Moore, the rebel leaders in early 1642.
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.
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 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.
Bellings and his colleagues, which included Peter Valesius Walsh, were temporarily arrested and detained in Kilkenny Castle,[2] but were released in time to conclude a new Omonde Peace with the Royalists in 1648.
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.
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.