Governor Bellingham

"He wore a dark feather in his hat, a border of embroidery on his cloak, and a black velvet tunic beneath--a gentleman advanced in years, with a hard experience written in his wrinkles. He was not ill-fitted to be the head and representative of a community which owed its origin and progress, and its present state of development, not to the impulses of youth, but to the stern and tempered energies of manhood and the sombre sagacity of age; accomplishing so much, precisely because it imagined and hoped so little"

- Chapter 3

Governor Richard Bellingham is a minor character in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. He is the brother of Mistress Hibbins, the governor of Boston and the leader of the Boston Colony.

After witnessing Hester Prynne's public humiliation for her adultery crime, he becomes harsh towards her into revealing the identity of Hester's lover and the father of her child Pearl, even attempting to take the young girl away from her mother. He is based on an actual historical figure, Richard Bellingham (1592-1672) who was also the Massachusetts Bay Colony leader at the time.

Description
Inspired by the real-life historical figure of the same name, Governor Bellingham was the governor a leader of the Boston Colony at the time of the novel's main events.