Henry Bard, 1st Viscount Bellomont
Irish noble (1616–1656)
Henry Bard, 1st Viscount Bellomont (1616 – June 20, 1656) was a soldier and diplomat from Staines. He served in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, then as envoy from the exiled Charles II of England to Safavid Iran and the Mughal Empire, where he died in 1656.
Born in Staines, Bard traveled through Europe and the Near East prior to the outbreak of the First English Civil War in August 1642. He joined the Royalist army and despite losing an arm at Cheriton in March 1644, commanded a brigade at Naseby in 1645. After Charles I surrendered in May 1646, Bard was created Viscount Bellomont and sent to Ireland to recruit men for the Royalist cause.
His ship was stopped while crossing the Irish Sea and he was arrested, then released in 1647 after agreeing to go into exile and not return to England until given permission. He remained with the exiled court of Charles II until 1653 when he left on his mission, arriving in Isfahan in 1654 accompanied by his secretary Niccolao Manucci. At the end of 1655, they continued from Isfahan to India where Bard died in June 1656; Manucci settled in Delhi and wrote a first hand account of the Mughal Empire which contains details of their journey.
Although John Hall, a contemporary from Cambridge University, described him as a "man of very presentable body and stout and undaunted courage", moderate Royalists like Clarendon criticised his brutality. This included his role in the killing of civilians at Leicester in June 1645, and alleged involvement in the 1649 murder of Isaac Dorislaus, then Commonwealth ambassador to the Dutch Republic.
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This entry incorporates text from “Henry Bard, 1st Viscount Bellomont” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.