Life
[freq. Maziere Brady;] b. 8 jan. 1825; son of Sir Nicholas Brady, a goldsmith and Mayor of Dublin, knighted by George IV on royal visit; grad. TCD 1848; MA, 1853; BD, 1858; ord. 1848 (deacon at St. Patrick’s); curacies at Maynooth, Kilkeedy (Limerick), and St. Dolough’s (Dublin); rector of Farrahy, 1851; vicar of Clonfert, 1861; chaplain to viceroys Lords Clarendon, St. Germans, and Carlisle; edited Parish records of Cork, Cloyne and Ross (3 vols, London 1866); visited Rome to pursue research on the so-called “Marian” transition, when Elizabeth dismissed recusant Catholic bishops in Ireland and others supposedly conformed; there he met with Patrick Moran, later cardinal at Sydney, and become convinced that no native-born bishops had conformed to the English State religion;
delisted as chaplain for the viceroys as a result of his known opinions; published The Irish Reformation; or, The Alleged Conversion of the Irish Bishops to the Reformed Religion, Disproved (1866), immediately occasioned by a sermon preached by Rev. William Lee (archdeacon of Dublin, 1864) at the consecration of Archbishop Trench; though not at first opposed to the Church of Ireland and its pretensions to authentic succession from St. Patrick, his ‘honest’ admission that the apostolic claims of the Irish Protestant church were false served as an important stave in the disestablishment arguments of William Godkin [q.v.] in his Ireland and Her Churches (1867); Brady’s writings in favour of in favour of disestablishment [see note] were collected as Essays on the English State Church in Ireland (1869).
Works
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James Godkin, Ireland and Her Churches (London: Chapman & Hall) - discusses the alleged succession of Church of Ireland bishops from Irish bishops who converted to the Canterbury communion at the time of the Norman invasion: ‘[...] There is, however, a beneficed clergyman in the Irish Church who has boldly denounced this pretended succession of the Anglican bishops from St. Patrick, as “the most impudent falsehood in all This fiction having been solemnly put forth as truth by the Archdeacon of Dublin, Dr. [Arthur] Lee; Professor of [41] Divinity in the Dublin University, in the sermon preached at the consecration of Archbishop Trench, the Rev. Dr. Brady came forward to refute the learned dignitary, in a pamphlet which bears the following title: — “The Alleged Conversion of the Irish Bishops to the Reformed Religion, at the Accession of Queen Elizabeth; and the Assumed Descent of the Present Established Hierarchy in Ireland from the Ancient Irish Church, disproved:” by W. Maziere Brady, D.D., Vicar of Donoghpatrick and Rector of Kilberry, Diocese of Meath, and formerly Chaplain to the Earls of Clarendon, St. Germans, and Carlisle, Lords Lieutenant of Ireland, Author of “Clerical and Parochial Records of Cork, Cloyne, and Ross;” “Remarks on the Irish Church Temporalities,” &c., &c.
Further: Dr. Brady states in his preface that, “in collecting materials for the ‘Clerical and Parochial Records of Cork, Cloyne, and Ross’, the writer was necessarily engaged, for many years, in examining the published works and unpublished archives relating to the Reformation period, and could not fail to remark that no documentary evidence was forth coming to verify the received opinions touching the asserted conversion of the Irish bishops and the descent of the Reformed episcopate from the ancient Irish Church. “It would be an unmanly and almost a dishonest course on the part of the writer to conceal the facts thus ascertained and allow the stereotyped assertions to be any longer employed, without refutation, as weapons of party warfare. If the Church in Ireland is to be preserved, that cannot be done by. stifling and suppressing the truth, and it is better that an admission of error should come from within the Church itself than that the charge of its being upheld by falsehood should be hurled against it, with more damaging force, by hostile hands. Under these circumstances the author hopes he may be pardoned for the part he now takes in contradicting what has been described to him, by perhaps the highest living authority, as ‘THE MOST IMPUDENT FALSEHOOD IN ALL HISTORY.’” (Godkin, op. cit., pp.40-41 [his emphasis]. (Ireland and Her Churches, London 1867, is available at Internet Archive - online; accessed 07.06.2024.)
Note: Contrary to remarks in the Dictionary of Irish Biography (RIA 2009) asserting that James Anthony Froude was among those who protested at Lee’s assertion, Godkin goes on to quote A. Froude"s astonishment that the Church of Ireland clergy hold to the delusion of an apostolic succession and the defection of the native bishops from Catholicism - see under Froude - as infra.
COPAC lists Anglo-Roman Papers, I: The English Palace in Rome; II: The eldest natural son of Charles II; III: Memoirs of Cardinal Erskine, Papal envoy to the court of George III (Paisley: Alexander Gardner 1890), 280pp.; Annals of the Catholic hierarchy in England and Scotland, A.D. 1585-1876 (Rome: Tipographia de la Pace; London: Thomas Baker 1877), 541pp.; 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 (1863, 1864); The Episcopal succession in England Scotland and Ireland: A.D. 1400 to 1875; with appointments to monasteries and extracts from Consistorial Acts, 3 vols. in 1 (Rome 1876-1877); The episcopal succession in England, Scotland & Ireland, A.D. 1400 to 1875 [1st edn. rep.], with a new introduction by A. F. Allison (Farnborough: Gregg 1971), 3v.([5], xxvi, 392p; [1],407p; [1], v-ix, 541p) ; 22cm.; Rome and Fenianism: The Pope’s Anti-Parnellite circular [New edn.] (London: Robert Washbourne 1883), 22, [2]pp; Some remarks on the Irish Church Bill, & c. (London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1869), 29, [3]pp.; Vice-regal speeches and episcopal votes in the Irish Parliament, from the reign of Charles I to the Union [excerpt from the Contemporary Review, Vol. 10], 2 pts. ([London, 1869]); Essays on the English State Church in Ireland (London: Strahan & Co. 1869), [vii]-x, 410pp. CONTRA: William Lee, D.D., Archdeacon of Dublin Title Details: Some Strictures on Dr. Brady’s Pamphlet in which he denies the descent of the Hierarchy of the present Church of Ireland from the Antient Irish Church: A letter to ... the Archbishop of Dublin (Dublin 1866); Two Letters in reply to certain “Observations” of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners for Ireland on a letter to The Times, concerning Irish Church revenues (London: Longmans & Co. 1868), 19pp.; The Irish Episcopal Succession: The recent statements of Mr. Froude and Dr. Brady, respecting the Irish Bishops in the reign of Elizabeth, examined by [...] A. T. L., &c. (London 1867); Facts or Fictions? Seven letters on the “Facts concerning the Irish Church” [by Alfred T. Lee], published by the Church Institution (Dublin: John Falconer 1867), 47pp.; Edward Adderley Stopford [Archdeacon of Meath], The Unity of the Anglican Church, and the succession of Irish Bishops: An answer to W. M. Brady (Dublin 1867).
SIR MAZIERE BRADY (1791-1871): Report on the condition and progress of the Queen’s University in Ireland, for the year ending June 19, 1852 / by Maziere Brady (Dublin: Printed by Alexander Thom, for Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1852), 39pp.; Report on the correspondence of Sir Maziere Brady (1796-1871,) Lord Chancellor in Ireland, 1840-66 [Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, 77/55 London 1977).
Emerald Isle Books (Cat. 1995) lists Essays on the English State Church in Ireland (London: Strahan 1869), 410pp.
Notes
Disestablishment: The Act of Disestablishment of the Irish Church was enacted in the British Parliament at Westminster on 26 July 1869, coming into force on 1 Jan. 1871. This had the effect of denying the Anglian Church in Ireland the right to gather tithes (or tenth-part taxes) from Catholics or others in that country. Since the proportion of the Protestant and Catholic populations in most Irish counties - Ulster excepted where Presbyterianism formed a distinct majority - was one to nine, this was felt to be a cruel imposition on a subject people whose land have been confiscated (or ‘stolen’) by the English Crown to the advantage of the Anglo-Irish beneficiaries who were chiefly descendants of members of the victorious military forces in successive conflicts who formed a colonial oligarchy in Ireland, as well as descendants of the mostly-English bishops of the Established Church who often establish ecclesiastical family dynasties through nepotism and land-purchase and were fequently ennobled in the process. This regime had been consolidated in the 18th century by a system of Penal Laws which effectively denied the native Irish any rights in their own land unless they conformed with the established religion (or “apostatised’ in other terms) - as very few indeed did for reasons of loyality and culture or even common understanding of the social and political relations involved not to mention any dsoctrinal difficulty they might have with a non-sacramental version of Christianity headed by the ruling English monarch. Henceforth the Anglican Church in Ireland would be known as the Church of Ireland - a separate Christian church though continuing ‘in communion’ with the Established English Church whose headship resided in the British Sovereign. With the coming of Irish Inpendence in 1922 the Church of Ireland ceased to include references to the English Crown in its rituals or undertakings.
The considerable bonus received by the Church under the Act - chiefly driven by the demands of the House of Lords in which the Irish episcopalian bishop sat by right under the terms of the Act of Union of Jan. 1801 - led to an intense building campaign among the Church of Ireland parishes although many of the churches built at that time soon became unused as the proportion of the Protestant episcopalian membership diminished or left rural areas. Latterly many stand empty or are used for agricultural storage or converted to other social uses such as arts centres. The controversy surrounding disestablishment in the 1860s which occupied much space in English as well as Irish newspapers led to the coining of the word "antidisestablishmentarianism" which has been identified as the longest single word in the English language. [BS]
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