BRADY, W. Maziere. Clerical and Parochial Records of Cork, Cloyne, and Ross, taken from Diocesan and Parish Registries, Mss. in the Principal Libraries and Public Offices of Oxford, Dublin, and London, and from Private or Family Papers. List of subscribers. Three volumes.

Dublin: Thom, 1863/64. Octavo. pp. (1) lxxii, 359, (2) iv, 565, (3) x, 370. Publisher’s blind-stamped cloth, titled in gilt. Spines evenly faded. Ex lib Michael Lenihan with neat embossed stamp. A very good set. Scarce.
William Maziere Brady (1825-94), clergyman and historian, was born in Dublin, son of Sir Nicholas William Brady, manufacturer of gold and silver lace, of Willow Park and Killiney Park, County Dublin, and Catherine Anne Brady, daughter of Peter Jacob Hodgson, comptroller of the customs, Dublin. Educated at TCD, William graduated BA (1848), MA (1853), BD (1858), and DD (1863). In 1848 he was ordained deacon at St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, and a priest at Lisburn; he held curacies at Maynooth (1848), Kilkeedy, Co. Limerick (1849), and St Dolough’s, Dublin (1851). He became rector of Farrahy (1851), vicar of Clonfert (1861), and rector of Kilberry, Co. Meath, and served as chaplain to the viceroys Clarendon, St Germans, and Carlisle until he made a speech criticising the established church, which led to his omission from the viceregal list in 1864.
A noted ecclesiastical historian, he was a meticulous scholar and industrious researcher. He contributed numerous letters and articles in favour of church disestablishment to contemporary publications, many of which appeared in his Essays on the English State Church in Ireland (London, 1869). In Some Remarks on the Irish Church Bill (London, 1869), he argued that it was ‘shameful and wicked’ that a privileged minority, in order to avoid supporting its own clergy, should be “willing to jeopardise the English church establishment, to delay the pacification of Ireland, to imperil the union between the two countries and to embroil the two branches of the imperial legislature in a dangerous constitutional quarrel.”
His arguments had moved him closer to Rome, and after a further period of research in the Vatican archives he resigned his Anglican positions and converted to Roman Catholicism in 1873. A unionist in politics, he corresponded with Gladstone, and published a pamphlet, Rome and Fenianism: the Pope’s anti-Parnellite Circular (London, 1883), supporting papal criticisms of the Parnellites.
He married (1851) Frances O’Reilly of High Park, Dublin. His uncle Sir Maziere Brady was three times lord chancellor of Ireland, and another uncle, Francis Tempest Brady, was rector of St Mary’s, Clonmel, and chancellor of Lismore.

[Cat 160]