enemies. 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. The Confederate Politician Bellings 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 Confederates' 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