Bertrand Russel is definitely trying to prove earth is a globe. No conflict of interest there. He was also anti-Catholic.
It would be fair to say that Bertrand Russell was anti-Catholic. He was not, however, the author I quoted. That was Jeffery Burton Russell who is a Catholic and professor of Medieval history. Given Jeffrey's age (in his 80s), he was probably raised in traditional Catholicism, although I don't know how much he went along with the changes.
It is highly unlikely that Jeffrey was trying to prove the earth is a globe since he wrote before the current resurgence of the flat earth movement. He would have assumed that his audience already believed in a globe earth. Jeffery was trying to expose an anti-Catholic myth that is commonly accepted in Western society - that the Catholic Church taught the earth is flat and opposed science. As as expert in history, he is familiar with the original sources and knows what was really believed by Catholics of the past.
Then he says: "No one before the 1830s believed that medieval people thought that the earth was flat." Yet, many of the early Church Fathers and Catholic cosmologists taught the heliocentric globe was a pagan belief and fought it. So, Dickson White and Russel seem to be working the globe from different anti-Catholic angles. Both detail in their articles a hatred for Catholic Fathers and Catholic teaching.
No, many of the early Church Fathers did not teach "the
heliocentric globe was a pagan belief" and this was not a fight at the time. The most common understanding of cosmology during the Patristic period was a
geocentric globe model. A few Church Fathers are on record as thinking the earth was flat. (The flat earth trads site manages to come up with four. If we add Cosmos Indicopleustes, a man with no religious authority, that makes a total of 5 known proponents of flat earth. This is not many.) But virtually nobody at that time was promoting a heliocentric model and so nobody was fighting against it. Heliocentrism did not become an issue until around a thousand years later.
Jeffrey Burton Russell does not have a hatred for Catholic Fathers and Catholic teaching. As a historian, he is known for being fair and even sympathetic to the Catholic Church. You are just as incorrect about his views as you are about his name.