Brady, Robert (c.1627–1700), historian and physician, was born at Denver, near Downham Market, Norfolk, the son of Thomas Brady, attorney, and Mary, daughter of Thomas Whick of West Walton, Norfolk. He was educated at Downham School, under Mr Gilbert, and in 1644 was admitted as a sizar to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he was a scholar, 1644–50, and from where he graduated BA in 1648. He was about to proceed MB in 1650 when his education was interrupted as he was forced to flee the country.

Brady had been declared a traitor and had his goods sequestered following the hanging of Edmund Brady, presumed to be his brother, at Norwich in December 1650, to prevent a threatened royalist insurrection in Norfolk. To ensure his safety Brady travelled via the Netherlands to the king's garrison in the Isles of Scilly. After its surrender in May 1651 and having failed to settle in France, Brady obtained articles to return to England. On returning to Cambridge in 1652 he graduated MB in 1653, but his political connections prevented him from taking his MD in 1658, and also led to his being imprisoned at Great Yarmouth for six months during this period. For the last years of the Commonwealth he maintained himself by practising medicine, assisting unofficially in his college's affairs, and acting as an agent for the Norfolk royalists, providing, as he later put it, ‘many services tending to his Majesty's Restauration’ (Pocock, ‘Robert Brady’, 187).

Following the Restoration Brady was created MD by the king's letters in September 1660. He remained at Gonville and Caius; when the master, Dr Bachroft, decided to retire in December of that year Brady was chosen, on Bachroft's recommendation, to succeed him, although he had never held a fellowship and was not a choice the fellows would have freely made themselves. His mastership was uneventful. In 1677, after some years of campaigning for the post, he succeeded Francis Glisson as regius professor of physic. He was admitted a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians on 12 November 1680.

However, it is as a historian, rather than a physician, that Brady is best known. The date he began historical research is unknown, but the first mention of his work appears in a letter he wrote in 1675 to Sir Joseph Williamson, secretary of state, in which he set out his intention to write a full history of England and asked for assistance to do so. The work would, he hoped,

begett in farre the greater and most considerable part of the people a Cheerfull submission and Obedience, as also a firm adherence to the present Government both in support and defence of it, Notwithstandinge the suggestions and insinuations of any sort of man whatsoever to the contrary. (Pocock, ‘Robert Brady’, 188)

The first of Brady's works, A Full and Clear Answer to a Book Lately Written by Mr Petyt, was published in February 1681, at the height of the exclusion crisis and on the eve of the Oxford parliament, to which he was returned. It pointed out the illogicality of the whig attack on Sir Robert Filmer's assertion of the crown's sovereignty over parliament. His work was criticized in the Commons by Sir William Jones and would probably have been ‘called into question and burnt’ if the parliament had lasted for another two days (Life and Times of Anthony Wood, 533). The timing of this work underlines the nature of his project. Brady's prime concern at all times was with bolstering the royalist cause; he viewed his critics not as academic rivals, but as writers ‘with design to promote Sedition, and in expectation of Rebellion, and the destruction of the Established Government’ (Brady, 326). His other principal works were An Introduction to the Old English History (1684), an assemblage of tracts rebutting rival historical theories, and A Complete History of England, a controversialist work dedicated to James II in which the historical narrative is formed from linked chronicles and prefaced with interpretative notes; the first volume appeared in 1685. His books made much use of records held in the Tower of London, and both were probably written under government auspices.

Brady's works are notable for their development of a new critical historical awareness and method. Royalist historians had generally been unsuccessful in challenging the dominant interpretation of English history established by Sir Edward Coke. This centred on the ahistorical idea of an ancient constitution and immemorial law unchanged by history, and which therefore predated and existed independently of the monarchy. It was a tradition which even denied the existence of the Norman conquest in its preoccupation with marginalizing the crown. If the law had depended on a conqueror's will it would forever depend on his and his successor's permission. In the hands of Restoration whig historians, such as William Petyt, William Atwood, and James Tyrell, this had become a powerful weapon against any extension of the royal prerogative. Brady's desire to overturn this politically limiting consensus led him to reject Coke and, following Sir Henry Spelman's lead, to recognize the importance of feudalism, imposed by the Normans, as the source of English law and the central reality of Norman and Angevin society. In its treatment of past society as understandable only in its own terms, this was an achievement which should, according to Pocock, be ‘reckoned as one of the most important occurrences in the history of our historiography’ (Pocock, Ancient Constitution, 198).

Brady was also active in parliamentary politics. He was involved in Norfolk politics during the election of 1679, when he nearly stood for his university but withdrew in favour of Sir William Temple, and was elected to the 1681 parliament and again in 1685. During the latter parliament he was reasonably active, particularly as a member of seven committees, among them one to bring in a clause forbidding resolutions to alter the succession. This work must have been particularly satisfying in light of the views on hereditary monarchy he had set out in A True and Exact History of Succession in 1681. Brady was also a JP for Middlesex and Westminster in 1687–9, and, as such, examined one of the minor figures of the Rye House plot.

In 1682 Brady was appointed physician-in-ordinary to Charles II, a post he retained under James II, and spent much time in attendance upon the court over the ensuing years. He was granted a salary of £300 to take custody of the records at the Tower of London in 1686, although he was not, as has sometimes been suggested, keeper, this being an office held by Sir Algernon May, an obscure gentleman living in Ireland at that time. The next year he joined James II in his visit to Oxford when the king attempted to impose a Roman Catholic president on Magdalen College. Brady assisted by identifying precedents for Nathaniel Johnston's royalist tract, The King's Visitorial Power Asserted. As physician he was one of those who deposed to the birth of the prince of Wales in 1688. His involvement with the Stuarts continued to the very end: at the urging of Bishop Turner of Ely he made a last minute attempt to dissuade James from flight at Rochester in December 1688. Following the revolution Brady remained master of Gonville and Caius, certifying in 1691 that he and the fellows had taken the oath of allegiance. Although he accepted the new regime, his well-known allegiance to the Stuarts left him vulnerable. In 1693 Brady was accused by a group of Royal College of Physicians fellows who supported the new regime of having killed a Mrs Campneis by treating her red face with a special ointment, leading him to complain to the college censors that he was ‘calumniated’ against.

Brady was to write no further historical works of any note and, with other royalists, was ordered to turn over the Tower records to his old adversary Petyt in March 1689. The second volume of his Complete History was published in 1690, but it contained only chronicle material without interpretation. The same year saw the appearance of his Treatise of Cities and Boroughs, a rather confused work presumably written some years earlier in support of Charles II's revision of the charters. It is sometimes suggested that he wrote the nonjuring tract An Inquiry into the Remarkable Instances of History and Parliamentary Records, published in 1691, but this remains uncertain. His historical work was heavily criticized and rejected by the historians of the new regime and remained generally ignored and forgotten for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Brady was married to Jane (1623–1679), daughter and coheir of Luke Constable of Swaffham. Brady died on 19 August 1700 and was buried in St Mary's Church, Denver, Nolfolk, leaving the bulk of his land and money to Gonville and Caius College.

Patrick Wallis