Robert Filmer

Sir Robert Filmer was an English landowner, justice of the peace and political writer, best known for defending the divine right of kings. He lived in the decades when the struggle between the Crown and Parliament grew sharper, and his name survives mainly because of the rebuttals his ideas provoked.

He was born around 1588 at East Sutton in Kent, the eldest child of a family with deep roots in the county. He matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1604 without taking a degree, and was admitted to Lincoln's Inn in 1605. He was called to the bar in 1613, though there is no evidence that he practised law. In 1618 he married Anne Heton, and King James I knighted him. After his father's death in 1629 he inherited the family manor and estate, and in the 1630s he served as a justice of the peace and an officer of the county militia. His life was largely local and domestic, far from the court.

During the conflict with the Long Parliament he opposed its actions. His manor house was looted in 1642, and his properties were heavily taxed the following year. He was imprisoned for several years at Leeds Castle, and he died around 26 May 1653.

His writings were informal and unsystematic, and he did not seek publication. His most famous work, Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings, circulated in manuscript and appeared posthumously in 1680. In it he argues that a father's rule over his household is the model for all government, that the authority given to Adam passed to the patriarchs and then to kings, and that a monarch cannot be judged by his subjects.

His influence came largely through the opposition he provoked. John Locke devoted the first of his Two Treatises of Government to refuting him, and Algernon Sidney and James Tyrrell also wrote against his views. Decades later, during the reign of Queen Anne, his doctrines enjoyed a brief revival.