Physician and historian of the seventeenth century, born in Norfolkshire, and studied at Caius College, Cambridge, where he took his degree of M.D. in 1660. About 1670 he was appointed keeper of the records in the Tower; and was afterwards made regius professor of physic in the university of Cambridge. He wrote a letter to Sydenham on the influence of air, which was published at the head of that learned physician’s Epistolæ Responsoriæ. His principal work is A complete History of England from the first entrance of the Romans unto the end of the reign of King Richard II., with an Introduction to the old English History, &c., in three vols, fol., 1685–1700. In his Introduction he maintains, that the representatives of the Commons in parliament, knights, citizens, and burgesses, were not introduced until the forty-ninth of Henry III.; that William of Normandy made an absolute conquest of the nation; and that the succession to the crown of England is hereditary and not elective;—principles which were afterwards adopted by Hume as the basis of his History. His other productions were, An Answer to Mr. Petyt’s Book on Parliaments, London, 1681, 8vo; and An Historical Treatise of Cities and Burghs, 1690, folio, both contained in the volumes of his history. Brady sat in parliament for the university of Cambridge in 1681; and again in 1685, under James II., to whom he afterwards became physician in ordinary. He died in August 1700.
