DIARY OF THOMAS BELLINGHAM An Officer under William III

The Glorious Revolution which displaced the Catholic and increasingly tyrannical James II with William of Orange and James’s Protestant daughter Mary is an epochal event in English history. This diary is a very valuable insider’s account. It’s author, Col. Thomas Bellingham, was a professional soldier who served in the Army of William of Orange after the latter deposed King James and became King William III. The period covered by this diary is a little over a year – August 1688 to September 1690 – but that dramatic period encompassed the Battle of the Boyne in July 1690 at which William’s army decisively defeated that of James on the RIver Boyne in Ireland. The Colonel’s diary, incidentally, is one of the chief sources of the great historian Lord Macaulay in his account of the battle in his ‘History of England’. Apart from its military interest, the diary gives a fascinating insight into the social life of a turn-of-the 17th/18th century English officer and gent.