Robert Brady (writer)

In the 1670s, he hoped to write for the prominent politicians Joseph Williamson and Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, but they declined the offer.

[5] In historical controversy, he was opposed to William Petyt and James Tyrrell, along what would become Tory versus Whig lines, then forming in the Exclusion crisis of the 1680s.

[7] John Pocock[8] regards as "unforgettably damaging" the effect the (proto-)Tory Brady and others made, in attacking the doctrine of the "Ancient Constitution" as a failed description of the real circumstances of political arrangements in the England of the Middle Ages.

On the narrow point of the actual legal effects of the Norman Conquest, Brady had been anticipated by Samuel Daniel, in views that are quite close to some modern scholars.

[4] David C. Douglas remarks that although his motivations as a scholar were at least as political as those of his opponents, his techniques were so far superior that his work remained of importance.