Reputation Versus Context in The Interpr

REPUTATION VERSUS CONTEXT IN THE
INTERPRETATION OF SIR ROBERT FILMER’S PATRIARCHA
Cesare Cuttica1
Abstract: This article sets out a novel analysis of Sir Robert Filmer’s (1588–1653)
well-known but often misread Patriarcha (1620s–30s). Claiming that a preoccupation
with John Locke’s criticism of Filmer has had distorting effects on modern historiog-
raphy and has prevented an appropriate contextual approach to the work. The article
proceeds along four lines. Firstly, drawing on the discovery of a manuscript note it
re-maps the configuration of its arguments, aims and intellectual milieu. Secondly, it
presents the treatise as the powerful articulation of the patriarchalist paradigm
deployed to attack the emerging language of county patriotism and the theory of papal
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
deposing power formulated by Jesuit thinkers like Robert Bellarmine and Francisco
Suarez. Thirdly, it places Patriarcha in the context of the late 1620s’ parliamentary
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2016
debates from which emerged the Petition of Right (1628) illuminating the reasons why
Filmer made use of the notion of the king as pater patriae with the aim of opposing
(quasi)-republican defenders of the so-called ‘common people’. Finally, the article
reshapes the role of patriarchalism in the history of early modern European political
thought, especially with regard to the centrality of the idea of ‘arbitrary’ power.
Keywords: Robert Filmer, patriarchalism, Patriarcha, patriots, Jesuits, context,
historiography, Charles I, Parliament, nation, father.
I
This article sets out a timely revision of Sir Robert Filmer’s (1588–1653)
well known but often misread Patriarcha (1620s–30s). It claims that John
Locke’s scathing criticism of patriarchalist ideas deployed in the First Trea-
tise (1689)2 has had distorting effects on modern historiography.3 This is to
say that Locke’s polemical attack — embedded as it was in the heated phases
1 Université Paris 8-Vincennes. Email: Cesare.Cuttica@univ-paris8.fr
2 See J. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. P. Laslett, (Cambridge, 2nd edn.,
1970), e.g. Bk. I, ‘The Preface’, pp. 155–6; ch. i, § 1, p. 159; ch. ii, § 6, p. 163; ch. iii, § 20,
p. 173; passim. For another well-known attack on Patriarcha see A. Sidney, Discourses
Concerning Government, ed. T.G. West (Indianapolis, 1990), e.g. Bk. I, ch. 1, p. 7; pas-
sim. For an enduring tradition of scornful attacks on Filmer see J.-J. Rousseau, ‘Discours
sur l’Économie Politique’, in Oeuvres completes, ed. B. Gagnebin and M. Raymond
(Paris, 1964), Vol. III, pp. 239–78, p. 244; ‘Th. Burnett an Leibniz, letter xvi, October 15,
1698’, in Die Philosophischen Schriften von Gottried Wilhelm Leibniz, ed. C.I. Gerhardt
(7 vols., Berlin, 1887), Vol. III, p. 243; G.W. Leibniz, ‘Meditation on the Common Con-
cept of Justice’, in Leibniz: Political Writings, ed. and trans. P. Riley (Cambridge, 2nd
edn., 1988), pp. 45–64, p. 62.
3 See e.g. G.P. Gooch, Political Thought in England: From Bacon to Halifax (Lon-
don, 1915), pp. 160–1; H. Laski, Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham
(London, 1920), pp. 9, 15–16, 38–9; G.D.H. Cole, Politics and Literature (London,
1929), p. 47; G.H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory (London, 1937), pp. 512–14,
524; P. Zagorin, A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution (London,
HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXXIII. No. 2. Summer 2012
232 C. CUTTICA
of the succession crisis of the 1680s — has prevented an appropriate contex-

tual approach to Patriarcha. By diverting the attention of both contemporary
theorists and modern scholars from the circumstances which prompted Filmer
to compose his absolutist writing, Lockian-conditioned interpretations failed
to understand Patriarcha’s forceful language and neglected its original argu-
ments and goals. In consequence, Filmer has mainly been depicted as a
narrow-minded representative of a patriarchal society, as a conventional
absolutist, or simply as the target of Locke and the late seventeenth-century
republicans Algernon Sidney and James Tyrrell.4 As a result, pivotal ques-
tions on the doctrines of Patriarcha were left unanswered.5 Therefore, fol-
lowing Johann Sommerville’s remark that it is ‘difficult to understand Filmer
unless we understand his context’,6 this article casts light on — paraphrasing
Quentin Skinner’s methodological maxim7 — ‘what’ Filmer was ‘doing’
when he composed his much deplored work.

To accomplish this task the article proceeds along four lines. Firstly, draw-
ing on the discovery of a manuscript note in which Filmer submitted to King
Charles I his request to have Patriarcha published in 1632, it re-maps the con-
figuration of its arguments, aims and intellectual milieu. Secondly, the article
studies the treatise as the powerful articulation of the patriarchalist paradigm
deployed to attack the emerging language of county patriotism and the theory
of papal deposing power formulated by Jesuit thinkers like Robert Bellarmine
1954), pp. 28, 200–1; J. Plamenatz, Man and Society: A Critical Examination of Some
Important Social and Political Theories from Machiavelli to Marx (2 vols., London,
1963), Vol. 1, pp. 173, 182, 186–7; J. Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An
Historical Account of the Argument of the Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge,
1969), pp. 58–9; D. Wootton, Divine Right and Democracy (London, 1986), p. 31.
4 For a complete summary of the various historiographical interpretations of Filmer’s
oeuvre see C. Cuttica, ‘Sir Robert Filmer (1588–1653) and the Condescension of
Posterity: Historiographical Interpretations’, Intellectual History Review, 21 (2011),
pp. 195–208.
5 The historiography on Filmer is largely indebted to the pioneering works of Peter
Laslett, Gordon Schochet and James Daly (see P. Laslett, ‘Sir Robert Filmer: The Man
versus the Whig Myth’, William & Mary Quarterly, 5 (1948), pp. 523–46; P. Laslett,
‘Introduction’, in Patriarcha and Other Political Works, ed. P. Laslett (Oxford, 1949),
pp. 1–43; G. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family
and Political Speculation and Attitudes Especially in Seventeenth-Century England
(Oxford, 1975); J. Daly, Sir Robert Filmer and English Political Thought (Toronto,
1979). Although their important interpretations differ in significant ways one from the
other, they presented two fundamental limits: Laslett and Schochet were committed to a
concept of social causation (patriarchy) as the quintessential explanation for intellectual
discourse (Filmer’s ideas), while Daly looked at Filmer as a fundamentally English char-
acter on a stage which, instead, was more open to continental ideas and debates.
6 J.P. Sommerville, ‘Introduction’, in Robert Filmer: Patriarcha and Other Political
Writings, ed. J.P. Sommerville (Cambridge, 1991), pp. vii–xxxvii, p. xxiv.
7 Q. Skinner, Visions of Politics: Volume I — Regarding Method (Cambridge, 2002),
e.g. pp. 82–3.
SIR ROBERT FILMER’S PATRIARCHA 233
and Francisco Suarez. Thirdly, what follows places Patriarcha in the context
of the late 1620s’ parliamentary debates from which emerged the Petition of
Right (1628). In so doing, it also illuminates the reasons why Filmer made use
of the notion of the king as pater patriae with the aim of opposing republican
defenders of the so-called ‘common people’.8 Finally, the article reshapes the
role of patriarchalism in the history of early modern European political
thought, especially with regard to the centrality of the idea of ‘arbitrary’
power.
Whereas the following pages go against the grain of much Filmerian histo-
riography written in the twentieth century, they also continue and expand the
findings of more recent scholarly research focused on Sir Robert’s ideas as
they were developed in the cauldron of historical controversies centred on
issues of liberty and sovereignty, allegiance and disobedience to monarchs.9
One further aspect informing this portrait of Filmer’s patriarchalist principles

has to do with the fact that both his criticism of his adversaries and his read-
ings of historical or biblical sources were often pursued in distorting and
unscrupulous manners. This feature of Filmer’s prose yields two important
considerations: it fully captures his work’s engagement in the midst of
national as much as international political discussions and it shows why fifty
years after it was first composed Patriarcha was adopted by the Tories as
their theoretical banner in what was a deeply ideological conflict of opinions
and identity in politics as well as in religion.
By proceeding in this way, it is hoped that novel attention will be paid to the
reality of Patriarcha rather than simply to its reputation.
II
On 8 February 1632, a week after Charles I had officially proclaimed his
intention to prevent writers from addressing matters of state since they led to
‘scandall of gouvernment and disadvantage of our service’,10 Georg Rudolph
Weckherlin, the government press licenser, brought to the King two manu-
scripts seeking licence for publication. One of them was a version of
Patriarcha. In Weckherlin’s words:
8 One underlying implication of the present piece is that Patriarcha responded to a

host of thinkers who were not directly referred to in the text. This is a way of presenting
Filmer’s work as part and parcel of a specific climate of disputes on the nature of power
and polemics concerning the relationship between king and Parliament.
9 See G. Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (New Haven and
London, 1996); L. Levy Peck, ‘Kingship, Counsel and Law in Early Stuart Britain’, in
The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500–1800, ed. J.G.A. Pocock, G. Schochet
and L. Schwoerer (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 80–115, pp. 106–7; L. Ward, The Politics of
Liberty in England and Revolutionary America (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 28–33.
10 British Library, Trumbull MSS, Misc. Corr., xix, fo. 16.
234 C. CUTTICA
Sir Robert Filmer brought me a Discourse to bee licensed for printing, writ-
ten of Government and in praise of Royaltie and the supreme authority
thereof. I most humbly crave your Majesties wise Censure, whether such a
subject at this time is fitter to bee made publick or kept in Non licet.11
Charles did not concede the licence. As a result, the treatise had to wait nearly
five decades before finding its way into print (1680).12
This is certainly no news, as historians Richard Tuck13 and Johann
Sommerville14 agreed that the greater part of the work was written in the late
1620s.15 Yet neither Tuck nor Sommerville focused on the historical and theo-
retical significance of the discovery that Filmer tried to go public in the tense
political context of the Forced Loan (1626–7) and the Petition of Right
(1628). Thus, if this circumstance suggests that his theories were neither the
product of Ship Money (1634–8) or of the debates of the late 1640s, nor were
they important only in connection with the discussions surrounding the

Exclusion Crisis (1679–81), as was maintained for a long time,16 it also opens
up new perspectives on the original meanings and objectives of Patriarcha.
The following pages intend to clarify why and in connection with what milieu
11 BL, Mss Add. 72439, Reasons for Refusing a Licence to Sir Robert Filmer’s
Patriarcha of G.R. Weckherlin, London 8 Feb. 1632, fo. 8. This is mentioned in A.B.
Thompson, ‘Licensing the Press: The Career of G.R. Weckherlin During the Personal
Rule of Charles I’, Historical Journal, 41 (1998), pp. 653–78, p. 668. The licenser’s note
in the Trumbull manuscript was unearthed in 1989. The other manuscript was a rather
hazardous comparison between Henry IV of France and King Gustavus Adolphus of
Sweden, which Weckherlin deemed damaging to Charles’s image (ibid., pp. 668–9).
12 The complex issue of why Charles I did not allow the publication of Patriarcha
will be addressed in a forthcoming book-long manuscript entitled Sir Robert Filmer
(1588–1653) and the Patriotic Monarch: Patriarchalism in Seventeenth-Century Politi-
cal Thought (Manchester, 2011/12). Here it is sufficient to mention that the govern-
ment’s refusal was, partly, due to the radical views expressed in Patriarcha and partly
(but more conjecturally) to the treatise’s failing to match the Caroline vision of authority.
13 R. Tuck, ‘A New Date for Filmer’s Patriarcha’, Historical Journal, 29 (1986), pp.
183–6.
14 According to Sommerville, ‘[p]erhaps the first two chapters of Patriarcha were
composed in the 1620s and the third chapter about 1630’ (Sommerville, ‘Introduction’,
p. xxxiv).
15 See also J. Rudolph, Revolution by Degrees: James Tyrrell and Whig Political
Thought in the Late Seventeenth Century (Basingstoke, 2002), p. 30; and G. Burgess,
‘England and Scotland’, in European Political Thought 1450–1700: Religion, Law and
Philosophy, ed. H.A. Lloyd, G. Burgess and S. Hodson (New Haven and London, 2007),
pp. 332–75, p. 360.
16 For the debate on when Patriarcha was composed see G. Schochet, ‘Sir Robert
Filmer: Some New Bibliographical Discoveries’, Transactions of the Bibliographical
Society (the Library), 5th series, 26 (1971), pp. 135–60; J.M. Wallace, ‘The Date of Sir
Robert’s Patriarcha’, Historical Journal, 23 (1980), pp. 155–65; J. Daly, ‘Some Prob-
lems in the Authorship of Sir Robert Filmer’s Works’, English Historical Review, 98
(1983), pp. 737–62.
of publications it was conceived; whether it responded to a particular target

and, if so, what the offending texts or political languages in question were;
what other kinds of preoccupations and motivations urged Filmer to compose
his writing. A first set of answers to these questions comes from the analysis
of the text.
The principal goal of Patriarcha was to assert ‘The Naturall Power of
Kinges Defended against the Unnatural Liberty of the People’. By employing
‘Theological, Rational, Historical, [and] Legall’ theses, Filmer stated that
men were born dependent on those who had begotten them.17 For him the
‘tenet’ that mankind was ‘naturally endowed and born with freedom from all
subjection, and at liberty to choose what form of government it please . . .
according to the discretion of the multitude’ was ‘first hatched in the schools
[of the Jesuits] and hath been fostered by all succeeding papists for good
divinity’.18 Filmer, however, made it clear that ‘divines . . . of the reformed

churches have [also] entertained’ this ‘tenet’ and added that ‘the common
people everywhere tenderly embrace it as being most plausible to flesh and
blood, for that it prodigally distributes a portion of liberty to the meanest of
the multitude as if the height of human felicity were only to be found in it’.19
Filmer opened up his argument by firing off a fusillade of opinions at odds
with different adversaries. Not only did he criticize Catholic theorists and
Protestant thinkers in one shot, but, most importantly, he vigorously attacked
‘the common people’ whose opinions questioned the absolute power of the
monarch.20 Aided by the works of resistance theorists like George Buchanan
and by monarchomachs’ claims that, if a king failed to protect the nation, it
was legitimate to overthrow him, some theorists argued that people’s alle-
giance to the sovereign was not absolute but could be rescinded if the latter
did not respect his oath. For Filmer, as we shall see, the main problem — and
17 R. Filmer, ‘Patriarcha: The Naturall Power of Kinges Defended against the

Unnatural Liberty of the People’, in Robert Filmer: Patriarcha and Other Political Writ-
ings, ed. Sommerville, pp. 1–68, p. 2.
18 Ibid., p. 2.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid. This Filmerian conviction that ‘the common people’ were a serious danger to
the monarchy became a leitmotif during the Restoration era. In the parliament of 1661
Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, stated that ‘the confounding [of] the Commons of Eng-
land . . . with the common people’ had led to the Civil War (N. Tyacke, ‘Introduction’,
in The English Revolution c.1590–1720: Politics, Religion and Communities, ed.
N. Tyacke (Manchester, 2007), pp. 1–26, p. 20). On the appeal to the common people
made by several MPs in the 1620s see D. Underdown, A Freeborn People: Politics and
the Nation in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1996), pp. 9–10. On the idea that
the common people were a danger to good government see C. Hill, ‘The Many-Headed
Monster in Late Tudor and Early Stuart Political Thinking’, in From the Renaissance to
the Counter-Reformation, ed. C.H. Carter (London, 1966), pp. 296–324.
236 C. CUTTICA
one to which he did not hesitate to give overwhelming importance21 — was

that these stances were becoming common among urbanized parliamentary
countrymen.22
In choosing these targets Sir Robert articulated his discourse on two levels.
Firstly, he engaged in a well-established theoretical dispute on the origins of
government and the role of men in assigning power to governors. He attacked
‘both Jesuits and some overzealous favourers of the Geneva discipline’ for
spreading the ‘pestilent’ theory of ‘the supposed natural equality and freedom
of mankind’ and for defending the notion of popular power.23 He singled out
Robert Parsons (also spelt Persons), Robert Bellarmine, Francisco Suarez,
and Buchanan and Calvin as those who claimed the right of the people to
depose and, eventually, punish their rulers should the latter flout the law. In
rejecting the contentions of these thinkers, Filmer kept an eye on the debates
concerning both papist influence in England and ‘Puritan’ adherence to resis-

tance theories.
Secondly, with his other eye watching the tense political situation of the
1620s in England, he criticized the ‘vulgar opinion [that] hath of late obtained
great reputation’ and of which ‘[i]t is hard to say whether it be more danger-
ous in divinity or dangerous in policy’.24 This ‘faith’ constituted ‘the whole
fabric of this vast engine of popular sedition’ which ‘many an ignorant sub-
ject hath been fooled’ into.25 As proved by the rhetoric of MPs and country-
men like his cousin Thomas Scott of Canterbury (c.1566–1635),26 the central
and most vicious belief was that ‘a man may become a martyr for his country
by being a traitor to his prince’.27 According to Filmer, this principle led to
the deleterious implication that parliament was above the king. Hence the
21 Filmer’s remarks on the increasing presence of rebellious forces in the country

advocating a political voice for the rabble need not be taken at face value, but they have to
be seen in conjunction with his rhetorical strategies.
22 See M. Peltonen, ‘Citizenship and Republicanism in Elizabethan England’, in
Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, ed. M. van Gelderen and Q. Skinner
(2 vols., Cambridge, 2002), Vol. I, pp. 85–106; R. von Friedeburg, ‘Civic Humanism and
Republican Citizenship in Early Modern Germany’, in ibid., pp. 127–45; R. Cust, ‘The
“Public Man” in Late Tudor and Early Stuart England’, in The Politics of the Public
Sphere in Early Modern England, ed. S. Pincus and P. Lake (Manchester, 2007), pp.
116–43.
23 Filmer, ‘Patriarcha’, p. 3.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid., pp. 3, 5.
26 See C. Cuttica, ‘Kentish Cousins at Odds: Filmer’s Patriarcha and Thomas Scott’s
Defence of Freeborn Englishmen’, History of Political Thought, 28 (2007), pp. 599–616;
C. Cuttica, ‘Thomas Scott of Canterbury (1566–1635): Patriot, Civic Radical, Puritan’,
History of European Ideas, 34 (2008), pp. 475–89.
calamitous ideas of puritan and quasi-republican thinkers that the people

could judge the ruler and regain the power they pretended to have given him.28
Thus, to better understand the theoretical and political texture of
Patriarcha the next paragraphs will explore Filmer’s discourse in this two-
fold dimension.29
III
While patriarchalism is generally acknowledged as the defining doctrine of
Patriarcha, less discussed is why Filmer chose this political paradigm to
defend absolute monarchy. One first answer comes from his attack on Jesuits
and Ultramontanists.30 In this respect, he continued a battle of ideas com-
menced in the previous century and which reached its peak at the time of the
controversy over the Oath of Allegiance (1606).31 Thus, Patriarcha’s criti-

cism of Jesuit ideas was both evidence that the echo of the Oath resonated
throughout Filmer’s work and the result of the 1620s’ deep hostility towards
everything Catholic and Spanish. In other words, Filmer pointed to the danger
represented by those who promoted an external allegiance to a power (Rome)
which was not the king’s. As the Jacobean Oath had been implemented by
King James I with the aim — as he wrote in 1608 — of separating among
his Catholic subjects ‘quietly minded Papists’ from dangerous ‘powder-
Traitors’,32 so Patriarcha responded to the notion (articulated by Parsons)
that, in some cases, subjects could take up arms and dethrone the tyrannical
monarch without having to wait for the approbation of the Pope.33
To testify to what degree animosity against the Jesuits was widespread in
Filmer’s England, be it sufficient to remember that on 10 April 1628 in a
28 This idea had a medieval pedigree, deriving from Roman law and canon law as
well as from English law (see J. Greenberg and C.C. Weston, Subjects and Sovereigns:
The Grand Controversy over Legal Sovereignty in Stuart England (Cambridge, 1981)).
29 For a thorough examination of Filmer’s patriarchalism and the differences between
his doctrines and those of Bodin, James I and Hobbes see Cuttica, Sir Robert Filmer
(1588–1653) and the Patriotic Monarch (forthcoming).
30 This is a point recognized in the scholarly literature, but not always explored in
depth (see e.g. Sommerville, ‘Introduction’).
31 Tuck argued that the original draft of Patriarcha might have been a contribution to
the debate on the Oath (Tuck, ‘A New Date’, p. 185). On the Oath of Allegiance and the
polemics ensuing from it see J.P. Sommerville, ‘Papalist Political Thought and the Con-
troversy over the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance’, in Catholics and the Protestant Nation,
ed. E. Shagan and M. Sena (Manchester, 2005), pp. 162–84. See also C. Condren, Argu-
ment and Authority in Early Modern England: The Presupposition of Oaths and Offices
(Cambridge, 2006), pp. 269–89.
32 King James VI and I, ‘Triplici Nodo, Triples Cuneus’, in King James VI and I:
Political Writings, ed. J.P. Sommerville (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 85–131, p. 86.
33 See R. Parsons, Elizabethae Angliae reginae haeresim Calvinianam propugnantis . . .
per D. Andream Philopatrum (Rome, 1593).
238 C. CUTTICA
‘Petition of Parliament against the Catholics’ — presented to the King — both

the Lords (Spiritual and Temporal) and the Commons petitioned ‘to put in
motion all the existing laws against Jesuits’ and urged ‘that those disaffected
subjects who have sheltered or concealed this generation of vipers in their
houses may suffer all the pains and penalties which the law has so justly
declared against them’.34 The document also requested that every means be
employed to prevent Jesuits and other popish people from entering the coun-
try and equally to preclude ‘sons of Papists’ from being ‘sent across the sea to
be taught the poisonous doctrines of rebellion and superstition’. Attacked for
their political and theological views, ‘the Papists’ were also prohibited ‘from
coming nearer than ten miles from London’. Limited in their movements, they
had to be relegated ‘to their houses and a circuit of five miles’. Moreover,
attendance at mass and participation in ‘superstitious ceremonies’ had to be
banned as they were ‘offensive to God, and a scandal in the sight of Your
Majesty’s loyal and religious subjects’.35 The implication that Catholics —

prompted by Jesuit creeds — were untrustworthy subjects was taken for
granted. It was in fact the main reason why they were spurned. In substance,
the zealous parliament-men presenting this petition intended ‘to uproot the
Papists, and to raise up and train a holy generation, and to sanctify a peculiar
people’.36
It was then on 23 June 1628 that — referring to a ‘letter sealed and put
under the door, with directions to this House, and superscribed with this,
“Cursed be he that doth not deliver this letter” ’ — Sir Edward Coke judged ‘it
not fit to be read, for it is a Jesuitical and devilish plot, and something which is
not fit touching his Majesty’s person, which upon the reading but of one line
we thought it not fit for the eye of any subject to look upon it, and therefore we
read no further of it’.37 Likewise, speaking in Parliament on 29 January 1629,
Sir Nathaniel Rich maintained that ‘we do reject the sense of the Jesuits and
Arminians and all others wherein they do differ from us’. The same statement
was repeated and subscribed to by the Commons.38
Preaching at the Northampton Assizes in 1627, the cleric Robert Sibthorpe
(d.1662) had argued that the idea that the right of resistance was a political
34 Historical Manuscripts Commission, 11th Report, Appendix, Part I, ‘The Manu-
scripts of the Henry Duncan Skrine, Esq., Salvetti Correspondence’ (London, 1887),
pp. 146–8, p. 147.
35 Ibid., p. 147.
36 Ibid., p. 148.
37 Historical Manuscripts Commission, 13th Report, Appendix, Part VII, ‘The
Manuscripts of the Earl of Lonsdale’ (London, 1893), p. 52 (italics added). On 5 June
1628, one Christopher Sherland MP had vented his anger because of the prominent role
occupied by ‘papists’ as ‘prime men in Court’ and among ‘captains’. Sherland bitterly
reminded that the ‘Arminian faction’ had turned the Low Countries upside down (ibid.,
p. 37).
38 Ibid., pp. 66–7.
instrument conceded to the people stemmed from the rebellious doctrines of

the Jesuits. He made it clear that Jesuit stances were extremely dangerous
since they made ‘the Church above the King, and the Pope above the Church’
and also ‘the Law above the King, and the people above the Law, and so’
they deposed ‘Princes, by their Tumults and Insurections’.39 The language
Sibthorpe adopted in his inflammatory sermon anticipated Filmer’s later dis-
course (1648) on the perils caused by those theories that ‘crucified [the king]
between two thieves’: the Pope and the people.40 This was indeed the problem
Sir Robert had already vigorously confronted in Patriarcha.41
Jesuit thinkers like Cardinal Bellarmine (1542–1621) and Francisco Suarez
(1548–1617) claimed that the Pope could interfere in the temporal sphere and
excommunicate heretical sovereigns. Accordingly, they legitimated people’s
rebellion by resorting to the supreme authority of the Pontiff. For this reason,
their principles were identified with the promotion of an external political

allegiance. As Filmer maintained, the Jesuits ‘thrust down the king below the
pope, thought it the safest course to advance the people above the king, that so
the papal power may more easily take place of the regal’.42 The chief threat of
Jesuit political thinking was thus the doctrine of the superior authority of the
Bishop of Rome over national monarchs. In fact, this controversy concerned
political betrayal and patriotism. It was not simply a matter of religious perse-
cution of the Catholic population in England.43 The main issue at stake since
the Oath controversy was that the doctrine of the deposing power was more
than an accessory theoretical one in that it constituted ‘an integral part of the
39 R. Sibthorpe, Apolostike Obedience Shewing the Duty of Subjects to pay Tribute

and Taxes to their Princes, according to the Word of God (London, 1627), p. 23. For the
absolutist Sibthorpe the king’s power was above the law, which was the expression of his
unrestricted authority. Consequently, the people did not hold the right to object to the
prince’s policies. This was also the time when ‘the Franco-Spanish plan for the invasion
of England became known’ (L.J. Reeve, Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule (Cam-
bridge, 1989), p. 43). But fear of an Anglo-Spanish peace was common too: the implica-
tion was that this would transform England into the slave of Spain and the Pope.
40 R. Filmer, ‘The Anarchy of a Limited or Mixed Monarchy’, in Robert Filmer:
Patriarcha and Other Political Writings, pp. 131–71, ‘The Preface’, p. 132.
41 At the end of January 1629, a petition advanced by one John Predian against the
Bishop of Lincoln considered the ‘Puritan faction’ agreed ‘in tertiis with the Jesuits’ and
attacked ‘those sectaries and maligners’ who ‘especially oppose royal prerogative’ (His-
torical Manuscripts Commission, 13th Report, Appendix, Part VII, ‘The Manuscripts of
the Earl of Lonsdale’, p. 67).
43 This is sustained in M.C. Questier, ‘Loyalty, Religion and State Power in Early
Modern England: English Romanism and the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance’, Historical
Journal, 40 (1997), pp. 311–29; and in M.C. Questier, ‘Elizabeth and the Catholics’, in
Catholics and the Protestant Nation, ed. Shagan and Sena, pp. 69–94.
240 C. CUTTICA
theory of church-state relations of Suaréz, Bellarmine, and other intellectual

leaders of the church’.44
In one of his most political works, De Laicis (conceived as a section of De
Controversiis of 1585), Bellarmine had concentrated on civil government, its
origins and governance. The starting point of his reflection was the separation
between the authority of the Pope — which derived immediately from God —
and that of temporal rulers — which, instead, stemmed from God only
through the mediation of the people. One of Bellarmine’s argumentative pil-
lars was the notion that God had assigned power to no one in particular, so that
kings claiming to have supreme authority over the people acted in bad faith.
As he put it, ‘Divine law gives . . . power to the collected body’ and ‘in the
absence of positive law, there is no good reason why, in a multitude of equals,
one rather than another should dominate’.45 Confirming this truth, the law of
nature prescribed that ‘this power is delegated by the multitude to one or sev-
eral’.46 Bellarmine explicitly said that not only ‘political power resides in the
people’,47 but that
. . . it depends on the consent of the people to decide whether kings, or con-
suls, or other magistrates are to be established in authority over them; and, if
there be legitimate cause, the people can change a kingdom into an aristoc-
racy, or an aristocracy into a democracy, and vice versa, as we read was
done in Rome.48
Bellarmine pointed out that ‘even if at the beginning those who founded king-
doms were usurpers for the most part, yet, by the passing of time, either they
or their successors became lawful rulers of those kingdoms, since the people
gradually gave their consent’.49 He was also adamant that ‘it is absolutely nec-
essary that the nation, if it is to be ruled rightly, must be ruled by laws, not
merely by the will of the ruler’.50 In stark contrast to Filmerian theory, the
Cardinal argued that while the multitude ‘consider the law carefully’, ‘the
ruler is only one, and frequently has to judge without due consideration’.51
For Filmer, Bellarmine’s viewpoint stemmed from the ‘desperate asser-
tion, whereby kings are made subject to the censures and deprivations of their
subjects’.52 Making of God ‘the immediate author of a democratical estate’,
the Jesuit theologian’s theory was full of contradictions and ended up
44 Sommerville, ‘Papalist Political Thought’, p. 175.
45 R. Bellarmine, De Laicis, or The Treatise on Civil Government, ed. M.F.X. Millar,
trans. E. Murphy (New York, 1928), ch. vi, p. 25.
46 Ibid., p. 26.
47 Ibid., p. 28.
48 Ibid., p. 27.
49 Ibid., p. 30.
50 Ibid., ch. x, p. 42.
51 Ibid., p. 43.
justifying that ‘pestilent and dangerous conclusion’ whereby ‘the multitude

may’ lawfully ‘change the kingdom into a democracy’.53 Yet Bellarmine’s
argument could be further critically torn apart in that, Filmer continued, he
had not denied that ‘not only Adam but the succeeding patriarchs had, by right
of fatherhood, royal authority over their children’. From this, it derived that
absolutely no ‘place for such imaginary pactions between kings and their peo-
ple as many dream of’ was left.54
In substance, Bellarmine tainted the patriarchalist process of transmission
of power with lethal uncertainty. His tenets of papal political might and popu-
lar authority irreparably broke the continuity of authority that Filmer saw
assured by the Adamite model. For Sir Robert there was no separation
between Adam’s reign and national states. In contrast to Bellarmine’s idea
that temporal polities were the outcome of God’s punishment of Cain, Filmer
depicted these political entities as legitimated by the original fatherly power

embodied in Adam.55 While Bellarmine saw the fragmentation of the prime

universal order caused by Cain’s act as the irreparable chaos afflicting
states,56 Filmer elicited from the Adamite paradigm what he thought to be the
most viable solution to govern efficiently the Augustinian ‘city of man’. It fol-
lowed that the fatherly authority of the first man did not die out. On the con-
trary, it represented the continuity of political interaction and justified the
superiority of secular rulers over the Pontiff.57
What is more, Filmer showed how Bellarmine and his fellow Jesuit
Suarez58 contradicted each other with regard to the alleged ‘natural liberty of
mankind’ and, consequently, to ‘the freedom of the multitude to choose what
rulers they pleased’ in that the Cardinal had acknowledged ‘that “the first par-
ents ought to have been princes of their posterity” ’. This meant that, unless
Suarez or his supporters provided ‘some reason’ for their assertions, it was
necessary to ‘trust more to Bellarmine’s proofs than to his [Suarez’] bare
denials’.59 Thus, if ‘[t]he ignorance of the creation occasioned several errors
amongst heathen philosophers’ such as Aristotle and Polybius, these were
53 Ibid., pp. 5–6.
54 Ibid., p. 7. If it is true that Filmer made Jesuit theories appear to be extremely dan-
gerous because subversive of the established authority of kings, it is nonetheless neces-
sary to remember that he was writing in the aftermath of the Oath of Allegiance, that is at
a time of mounting anxiety towards all manifestations of disobedience to kings (casu-
istry, doctrine of mental reservation, papalist thought).
55 Ibid., p. 10.
56 D. Ferraro, ‘Bellarmino, Suárez, Giacomo I e la Polemica sulle Origini del Potere
Politico’, in Bellarmino e la Controriforma, ed. R. De Maio, A. Borromeo, L. Gulia and
A. Mazzacane (Sora, 1990), pp. 191–250, pp. 213, 234.
58 On Filmer’s confutation of Suarez’ opinions (especially, on Adam’s political
function) see ibid., pp. 15–20.
59 Ibid., p. 19.
242 C. CUTTICA
unacceptable in people like Bellarmine and Suarez who knew ‘Moses’ his-
tory’ whereby ‘ “God made all mankind of one man, that he might teach the
world to be governed by a king, and not by a multitude” ’.60
By and large, Filmer’s attack on Jesuit thinkers was not exclusively
directed at the notions of popular government and natural freedom.61 It was
also launched against the papalist belief that Catholic subjects owed their pri-
mary allegiance to Rome rather than to the state and its secular powers. Filmer
regarded Bellarmine as the mouthpiece of the ‘Jesuitical’ fifth column lurking
in the country to strike at the heart of monarchy as had happened earlier in
France, where Juan de Mariana’s doctrines were seen as having influenced
François Ravaillac, the murderer of King Henry IV. In fact, in the anti-Jesuit
pamphlet-war of the early Stuart period Mariana’s De Rege et Regis
Institutione (1599), Bellarmine’s De Potestate Pontificis in Temporalibus
(1610) and Suarez’ Defensio Fidei Catholicae (1613) epitomized the justifi-
cation of parricide with which the killing of kings was associated.62 Ideas like
those of Mariana and Bellarmine undermined the foundations on which stood
the national and political heritage of monarchical government. Confronted by
the murders of Henry III (1589) and Henry IV (1610) in France and by the
Gunpowder Plot (1605) in England, monarchists had realized that words
could catastrophically turn into actions, indeed murderous actions.63 Since the
latter were sustained by a discourse whose cornerstone was the formula pro
rege et patria, which contemplated the killing of evil fathers in order to pro-
tect the fatherland,64 theorists like Filmer deprived patriotism of its potentially
dangerous message. They turned it to the advantage of monarchy and its
supreme representative. In this milieu patria lost its Ciceronian and republi-
can connotations.65 Instead, it began to share part of its vocabulary and images
with the rival model based on the concept of the king as pater patriae.66
60 Ibid., p. 14.
61 See ibid., pp. 12–13.
62 R. Mousnier, L’Assassinat d’Henry IV 14 Mai 1610 (Paris, 1964), p. 36. See also
M. Turchetti, Tyrannie et Tyrannicide de l’Antiquité à Nos Jours (Paris, 2001), e.g.
p. 286.
63 M. Greengrass, ‘Regicide, Martyrs and Monarchical Authority in France in the
Wars of Religion’, in Murder and Monarchy: Regicide in European History, 1300–1800,
ed. R. von Friedeburg (Basingstoke, 2004), pp. 176–92.
64 Théodore de Béze claimed that filial loyalty came second to patriotic allegiance to
the fatherland (J.H.M. Salmon, ‘France’, in European Political Thought, ed. Lloyd, Bur-
gess and Hodson, pp. 458–97, p. 472).
65 See M. Viroli, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism
(Oxford, 1995).
66 On the origins of the metaphor ‘pater patriae’ see E.H. Kantorowicz, The King’s
Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, 1957), esp. pp. 248 ff.;
R. Bast, Honor Your Fathers: Catechisms and the Emergence of a Patriarchal Ideology
in Germany 1400–1600 (Leiden/New York/Cologne, 1997), esp. p. 147.
In tune with this, Filmer argued that the king was above fathers because his
patriotic task was broader. As he put it:
If we compare the natural duties of a father with those of a king, we find
them to be all one, without any difference at all but only in the latitude or
extent of them. As the father over one family, so the king, as father over
many families, extends his care to preserve, feed, clothe, instruct and
defend the whole commonwealth. His wars, his peace, his courts of justice
and all his acts of sovereignty tend only to preserve and distribute to every
subordinate and inferior father, and to their children, their rights and privi-
leges.67
The Adamite paradigm consolidated the perpetuity of the patria against
papist stances. Indeed, Filmer adopted patriarchalism because of its paternal-
patriotic thrust. From its philosophical bedrock he extrapolated the concept
that ‘many a child, by succeeding a king, hath the right of a father over many a
grey-headed multitude, and hath the title of pater patriae’.68 Relying on the
polycentric nature of patriotism,69 Filmer associated the image of the monarch
with that of the father: ‘all the duties of a king are summoned up in an univer-
sal fatherly care of his people’.70 To counterattack the theory of papal depos-
ing power, he depicted the sovereign as political Adam — ‘the father of all
flesh’.71 This step had a twofold political meaning: firstly, it solved the prob-
lem of political continuity since the creation of monarchical government cor-
responded to the origins of society; secondly, it interpreted the law as the
outcome of the supreme decision of the lex loquens king.
However, it was this view that most strikingly contrasted with parliamen-
tary accounts of legislative life in the polity that were being put forward at that
historical juncture.
IV
Patriarcha was written at a time when many countrymen proclaimed them-
selves ‘patriots’ and MPs maintained themselves to be the true defenders of the
nation of ‘freeborn Englishmen’.72 Their discourse was rhetorically persuasive,
68 Ibid., p. 10.
69 See G. Brennan, Patriotism, Power and Print: National Consciousness in Sixteenth-
Century England (Cambridge, 2003).
71 Filmer, ‘The Anarchy of a Limited or Mixed Monarchy’, p. 139.
72 As Sir Roger North put it on 6 May 1628: ‘Our condition is that we are born free
men; we are sent hither from the public not as private men; and we are sent to do the busi-
ness of the public’ (Proceedings in Parliament 1628 (6 vols., New Haven and London,
1977–83), Vol. III, p. 292). See also Proceedings in Parliament 1628, Vol. II, p. 66; Vol.
IV, pp. 128–31. For earlier instances see Proceedings in Parliament 1626 (4 vols., New
Haven and London, 1991–6), Vol. III, p. 226. On the freeborn people see Underdown, A
244 C. CUTTICA
especially in a period when the Stuart government implemented unpopular

policies like the Forced Loan and manifested sympathy for Catholicism.73 As
a result of their divisive religious moves, controversial political strategy at
home and disastrous diplomatic campaign abroad, the Stuarts lost the consen-
sus the English crown had previously been able to rely on.74 Unsurprisingly,
therefore, the speeches of several MPs in the Commons conveyed principles
that questioned the royal prerogative.75 Likewise, an increasing number of
polemicists resolutely voiced their support for Parliament as the bastion of
English liberties in opposition to this supreme prerogative.76 Among these
was the Dutch scholar Isaac Dorislaus who, on 12 December 1627 at Cam-
bridge,77 delivered an inflammatory lecture defending republican values. In
particular, he praised citizens’ active participation in the polity against all
forms of absolute power. Dorislaus asserted that virtuous men had to fight for
their country and had the duty to expel from the commonwealth the sover-
eign-turned-tyrant so as to preserve their liberties.78

Recalling Dorislaus’ lines, Thomas May’s translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia
(1627) depicted the Earl of Pembroke as ‘a noble Patriot . . . [f]ree from ambi-
tion, free from faction’ and compared him to the republican heroes Cato and
Brutus.79 In The Spy Discovering the Danger of Arminian Heresie and Span-
ish Trecherie (1628) John Russell defined himself as one of the ‘true Patriots’
seeking ‘publique preservation’ against ‘Spanish designes’.80 Russell thought
the commonwealth was perishing under George Villiers, 1st Duke of Bucking-
ham, and his courtly unpatriotic acolytes.81 In fact, the murder of the Duke
in 1628 left the English political and ideological landscape increasingly
Freeborn People, pp. 24, 33, 56, passim; D. Hirst, The Representative of the People?
Voters and Voting in England under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 65–89.
73 See R. Cust, The Forced Loan and English Politics 1626–1628 (Oxford, 1987).
74 See K. Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England: The Culture of Seventeenth-
Century Politics (Cambridge, 2000), passim; R. Cust, ‘ “Patriots” and “Popular” Spirits:
Narratives of Conflict in Early Stuart Politics’, in The English Revolution, ed. Tyacke,
pp. 43–61.
75 North maintained that the King had to govern ‘according to the law, not by his pre-
rogative’ (Proceedings in Parliament 1628, Vol. III, p. 292).
76 Ibid., pp. 209, 275.
77 See V. Morgan, ‘Whose Prerogative in Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Cen-
tury England?’, Journal of Legal History, 5 (1984), pp. 39–64.
78 M. Todd, ‘Anti-Calvinists and the Republican Threat in Early Stuart Cambridge’,
in Puritanism and Its Discontents, ed. L. Lunger Knoppers (Newark and London, 2003),
pp. 85–105, p. 87.
79 M.A. Lucan, Pharsalia . . ., trans. Thomas May (London, 1627), fos. A2–4.
80 J. Russell, The Spy Discovering the Danger of Arminian Heresie and Spanish
Trecherie (Strasbourg, i.e. Amsterdam, 1628), fos. A1–2.
81 Ibid., fos. E4–F1.
divided.82 In anti-Stuart circles Buckingham became the byword for foreign

effeminacy and degeneration of virtue.83 Instead, his murderer John Felton
was held as the true patriot who had exercised Parliament’s will and fulfilled
God’s design for the sake of the English nation.84 As an anonymous poet put
it, Felton had ‘wonne / The prize of Patriots to a British sonne’.85 In November
1628 Richard James, ‘a grate lover of his country and hatter of all suche as he
supposed enimies to the same’, praised Felton as ‘that worthy patriot’.86
In the same crucial 1628 Alexander Leighton sent copies of his Sions Plea
from the Netherlands to every English MP, emphatically calling for their total
support of the ‘common cause’. This was the preservation of the country
against those who discredited Parliament and its important role. Leighton
invited MPs to embrace the model of the vita activa as the most pertinent to
their task. They had to promote the common good and refuse to privilege
private interest. Insisting on the instructive example of classical history,

Leighton stressed that ‘[w]ee [true Englishmen] neede not tell you of the
Romane Patriots . . . who were willinge to dye [so] that the glorie of their
nation might live’.87 It was exactly this rhetoric that Patriarcha chastised as
seriously misleading about the true structure of the commonweal. Filmer
stated that it was up to the ruler to contribute to the wealth of his realm so as to
preserve unity within it. As he put it:
It is the multitude of people and the abundance of their riches which are the
only strength and glory of every prince. The bodies of his subjects do him
82 A. Bellany, ‘ “The Brightness of the Noble Leiutenants Action”: An Intellectual
Ponders Buckingham’s Assassination’, English Historical Review, 118 (2003), pp.
1242–63.
83 In 1624 Buckingham had himself embraced the cause of patriotism when he had
assumed the role of leader of the coalition in charge of the fleet sent to La Rochelle to lib-
erate the Huguenots, restoring in the popular eye his reputation as a patriotic hero
(R. Cust, ‘Was There an Alternative to the Personal Rule? Charles I, the Privy Council
and the Parliament of 1629’, History, 90 (2005), pp. 330–52, p. 334). On the Duke’s
patriotic aspirations see T. Cogswell, ‘The People’s Love: The Duke of Buckingham and
Popularity’, in Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain: Essays in Hon-
our of Conrad Russell, ed. T. Cogswell, R. Cust and P. Lake (Cambridge, 2002), pp.
211–34; and Bellany, ‘ “The Brightness of the Noble Leiutenants Action” ’, passim.
84 Bellany, ‘ “The Brightness of the Noble Leiutenants Action” ’, p. 1251.
85 Cited in T. Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of
War, 1621–1624 (Cambridge, 1989), p. 84.
86 Dictionary of National Biography, ‘James, Richard’. However, Felton’s murder
was also described as a horrible crime and as a fundamentally un-English act since it
introduced the odious ‘Jesuitical’ practice of killing those in authority (Cust, ‘Was There
an Alternative to the Personal Rule?’, p. 331).
87 A. Leighton, An Appeal to the Parliament; or Sions Plea against the Prelacie . . .
(Amsterdam?, 1628), ‘Epistle to the . . . Parliament’. See also M. Peltonen, Classical
Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge,
1995), p. 274. Leighton was unaware that Charles had dissolved Parliament.
246 C. CUTTICA
service in war, and their goods supply his public wants. Therefore, if not out
of affection to his people, yet out of natural love to himself, every tyrant
desires to preserve the lives and protect the goods of his subjects, which
cannot be done but by justice, and if it be not done, the prince’s loss is the
greatest.88
In substance, Filmer insisted that monarchy was the best form of govern-
ment to guarantee the prosperity of the governed and preserve the wealth of
the kingdom. ‘On the contrary’, he remarked, ‘in a popular state every man
knows that the public good doth not depend wholly on his care, but the com-
monwealth may be well enough governed by others though he tend only his
private benefit. He never takes the public to be his own business’. Likewise,
the magistrates of popular states showed no commitment to the public good.
‘[B]eing for the most part annual, [they] do always lay down before they
understand it, so a prince though of a duller understanding, by use and experi-

ence must needs excel them.’89 Filmer inferred that only absolute monarchies
ensured continuity to the political process. After all, as proved many times in
history, ‘the last refuge in perils of states is to fly to regal authority’.90 On Sir
Robert’s partisan account, the king’s prerogative — being the caring action of
a fatherly authority unhindered by legal fetters — defended people’s liberties
(e.g. property).91 Instead, Parliament was a fragile assembly at the mercy of
the ‘good will’ of MPs, whose only goal was to preserve their position without
any considerations for the future of the nation.
Worried by what he saw as commonwealthmen’s seditious attacks on the
institution of monarchy, Filmer not only reminded his fellow countrymen that
‘[t]he best order, the greatest strength, the most stability and easiest govern-
ment are to be found all in monarchy, and in no other form of government’. He
also — and most interestingly — drove home the point that
[t]he new platforms of commonweals were first hatched in a corner of the
world, amongst a few cities of Greece, which have been imitated by very
few other places. Those very cities were first for many years governed by
kings, until wantonness, ambition or faction made them attempt new kinds
of regiment. All which mutations proved most bloody and miserable to the
authors of them, happy in nothing but that they continued but a small time.

89 Ibid.
90 Ibid., p. 26.
91 ‘Liberties’ are certainly not ‘liberty’ in the modern sense. Hence they are perfectly
compatible with the (Filmerian) idea of a sovereign in virtue of whom they are created
and held. No more than this is implied: no attempt is made here to turn Filmer into a
champion of liberty. The author owes clarifications on this point to Iain Hampsher-
Monk.
His adversaries, the so-called public men irreverently going on about the right
and liberties of the ‘common people’, were being forcefully alerted to the
desolation to which their politics were conducive.
Whereas patriarchalism — being founded on the Adamite model — pro-
moted order in the body politic and unity of sovereignty in the person of the
ruler, country patriotism engendered a scenario where the disorder of Babel
had been restored. Accordingly, Filmer underlined that ‘the safety of’ the
ruler’s ‘kingdom be his chief law . . . and that the public is to be preferred
before the private’.92 He then emphasized that even usurpers and tyrants were
‘bound to preserve the lands, goods, liberties and lives of all their subjects, not
by any municipal law of the land, but by the natural law of a father’.93 This is
to say that Filmer did not accept his opponents’ notion that subjects were orig-
inally endowed with liberties which had to be necessarily acknowledged and
respected as values per se by the monarch. In this sense, his discourse relied
on the overriding importance of fatherly recognition of people’s liberties

rather than on any artificially and conventionally established constitutional
arrangement guaranteeing their rights.
Confronted by what Kevin Sharpe has called the binary but intertwined
processes of ‘mystification’ and ‘demystification’ of monarchy,94 Filmer pre-
sented kingship under the re-mystified image of patriarchalist rule and its
fatherly leader. Most importantly, his idea of a common origin of mankind
and his concept of generation from Adam represented the antithesis of the
patriotic discourse grounded on a less inclusive idea of nation. The latter had
to be formed of Protestant (especially, godly), publicly active and zealous
countrymen.95 In this climate, many MPs understood the importance of being
reputed ‘honest patriots’ by their constituents in the country. After all, as the
Venetian ambassador Alvise Contarini (reporting on the parliamentary elec-
tions of 1628) revealingly pointed out, ‘[a]ll the counties have uniformly
rejected candidates who had even a shadow of dependence upon the Court,
electing members who refused the late subsidies, who are now everywhere
called good patriots’.96 In practice, these representatives of the ‘common people’
93 Ibid., p. 42.
94 Sharpe, Remapping, passim.
95 In typifying his ideal of a glorious and godly England, Thomas Scott of Canterbury
(1620s) proclaimed that ‘no ware ought to be taken in hand, but in the feare of God, by a
Nation well disciplined, and a sanctified hoaste’ (Canterbury Cathedral Library, Mss
Urry 66, fo. 85r). Excluded from Scott’s idea of nation were those members of the unpatri-
otic faction formed of ‘Irish . . . the Germans, Papists, Arminians, Maynwarians, and
other Dukists’ who were ready ‘to cut some of our throats and to settle popery, the excise
and mass’ (Proceedings in Parliament 1628, Vol. VI, p. 232).
96 Letter from Alvise Contarini . . . to the Doge and Senate in Venice, on March 15
1628, in Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts Relating to English Affairs . . ., ed.
R. Brown (London, 1864), Vol. XXI (1628–9), pp. 21–2, 21.
248 C. CUTTICA
fostered the image of a political type whose chief task was the patriotic consoli-
dation of parliamentary England.
V
Ferment in the Commons can be captured in the discourses of early May 1628
focusing on a bill aimed at ‘the confirmation of Magna Carta and the other six
statutes insisted upon for the subject’s liberty’.97 Following the heated dis-
putes on the Forced Loan and the consequent imprisonment of the resisters,98
the proceedings and debates which took place on Tuesday 6 May 1628 in the
Committee of the Whole House centred on the Speaker’s speech delivered in
the Commons and the King’s answer to it. To the insistence on the rights and
liberties of the subject advanced by sundry MPs,99 the Speaker replied that the
King feared that the Commons’ request of an explanation ‘will hazard an

encroachment upon his prerogative’.100 This exchange occurred in the tense
atmosphere which saw the parliamentary Petition of Right addressed to

Charles I.101 It was then that, considering ‘the bleeding estate of the common-
wealth’ and ‘the condition of the persons that sent us’, Roger North under-
scored MPs’ ‘freedom of speech’.102 In the same session, Nathaniel Rich
fervently admonished: ‘Let us first determine whether the satisfaction given
by his Majesty be sufficient or not . . . He promises he will give us by his laws
97 Proceedings in Parliament 1628, Vol. III, p. 254. See also ibid., p. 125. On these
issues see J.G.A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge,
1957), pp. 44–5; J.W. Tubbs, The Common Law Mind: Medieval and Early Modern Con-
ceptions (Baltimore and London, 2000), pp. 141–72.
98 Underdown, A Freeborn People, p. 40. For examples of resistance to billeting of
troops in the Commons see Proceedings in Parliament 1628, Vol. II, pp. 127–8, 168–70,
253–5, 361–5, 383–5.
99 M. Kishlansky, Parliamentary Selection: Social and Political Choice in Early
Modern England (Cambridge, 1986), p. 18; D. Hirst, England in Conflict, 1603–1660:
Kingdom, Community, Commonwealth (London, 1999), pp. 22–4, 107.
100 Proceedings in Parliament 1628, Vol. III, p. 254.
101 J.A. Guy, ‘The Origins of the Petition of Right Reconsidered’, Historical Jour-
nal, 25 (1982), pp. 289–312, esp. pp. 297 ff. For a different account of the origins of the
Petition of Right see M. Kishlansky, ‘Tyranny Denied: Charles I, Attorney General Heath,
and the Five Knights’ Case’, Historical Journal, 42 (1999), pp. 53–83. Kishlansky spoke
of ‘the volatile language of liberty’ employed by MPs in 1628 (ibid., p. 61). For
Kishlansky the opposition to Charles I that erupted in the Commons in 1628 was the out-
come of ‘a conspiracy against him’, the sign that his government and actions were being
misrepresented. Yet Kishlansky recognized that the year 1628 was ‘different’ in that it
saw the King and many MPs become deeply at odds on issues such as arbitrary arrest and
imprisonment without cause shown to the extent that it is possible to speak of ‘mutual
distrust’ between them (ibid., p. 83). In fact, the Commons opted for restoring trust in the
common law rather than in the monarch (ibid., p. 82).
102 Proceedings in Parliament 1628, Vol. III, p. 269. See D. Colclough, Freedom of
Speech in Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 184–5.
or the confirmation of the laws. We have nothing thereby but shells and shad-
ows.’103 Therefore, Rich continued: ‘Let the King assure us of his power what
it is, and then we shall trust him. I would be glad to hear the King say he may
not by law billet soldiers or lay loans. Let the point of trust be but agreed on,
and then we shall trust the King.’104
It was in this context that Sir Edward Coke invoked the importance of a ‘pe-
tition of right’: ‘not that I distrust the King, but because we cannot take his
trust but in a parliamentary way’. This opinion was shared by Sir John Glan-
ville who suggested to ‘frame a petition of right, that without redress thereof
we cannot go with comfort to our country’.105 Sir Robert Phelips agreed: ‘Let
our business be put in a petition of right. Let us not flatter ourselves. We have
suffered as much violation of laws and liberties as ever.’106 On the same day,
Edward Littleton asserted that he ‘would not recede a tittle from them [the
resolutions taken on 3 April]. It will weaken the opinion of us abroad. Will not
the world think we tacitly desert our former grounds?’.107 The issues of ‘im-
prisonment and restraint of personal liberty’ occupied a central portion of the
debates. According to Sir John Eliot, ‘the liberty of the person is that which
most I stand upon. You see it every day lost. We may not recede’.108
Driven by this sense of duty, on 2 May 1628 Sir Walter Erle, one of the five
knights who had refused to pay the Forced Loan, had stated that what Parlia-
ment men
have done is only for the liberty of the subject, and it is no new thing; and
this we have done because it is conceived that the subject has suffered more
in the violation of the ancient liberties within these few years than in three
hundred years before.109
Four days later, the ringleader in the Five Knights’ case and Loan-refuser
William Coryton declared:
Old laws are said to be old buildings, and need underpinning; but I say an
old law is most perfect for, for a long time until of late, who dared violate
Magna Carta? Though laws are made, it is said the King may be over
severe; but it is not so with good kings. Law does direct king and people,
and prerogative should help law.110
In addressing the issue of parliamentary supply, Coryton clarified the divide
between king and MPs: ‘His Majesty does according to his greatness, we
103 Proceedings in Parliament 1628, Vol. III, p. 270.
104 Ibid.
105 Ibid., p. 272.
106 Ibid., p. 273.
107 Ibid., p. 275.
108 Ibid., p. 278.
109 Ibid., p. 209.
110 Ibid., p. 275.
250 C. CUTTICA
according to our duty. I am for a law, and a law explanatory’. Equally, North
expressed his concerns by remarking that ‘[h]e that looks upon the bleeding
estate of our commonwealth cannot but think it is cureless if this parliament
relieve it not’. In a quasi-apocalyptic tone he proclaimed: ‘This day may
either save or ruin it [the commonwealth].’111 He then added: ‘we shall be
asked whether we have done what they [the constituents] sent us for, we shall
tell them we have a confirmation of Magna Carta’.112 These MPs felt the
responsibility to fulfil ‘the desires of those that sent us to save the public and
keep them from being slaves’.113
In general, these opinions formed in a context where ‘[t]he Country . . .
gave the notion of representative a new meaning’.114 They carried ‘a shared
moral imperative whereby conscience reinforced their interpretation of the
law of the land’. Aiming to increase the power of the parliamentary assembly,
the ideas of these MPs epitomized the spirit of ‘public men’ driven by
integrity and probity.115 Their task was to ‘speak for their country’.116 Their
rhetoric was founded on the constitutional bastion of freedom of speech in
Parliament.117 The principle of ‘consent’ also shaped their political agenda,
and their role as representatives of the people118 became ‘prominent’ in link-
ing ‘centre’ and ‘localities’.119 In an anti-Filmerian vein, they also insisted on
‘the limited or mixed nature of the English monarchy’.120
Their activity in the early Caroline Parliaments took place at a time when
Elizabeth’s reign and her victorious foreign policy became a byword for what
England — as ‘true Englishmen’ claimed — ought to be and was no longer.
Mutual trust between the Queen and her subjects had fostered success abroad
and peace at home. Instead, Charles’s political conduct was viewed as a fail-
ure for the English nation.121 Therefore, the King and his supporters had to
confront what Richard Cust has defined as ‘the threat from popularity’. In
fact, the idea that a popular conspiracy was imminent became so widespread
111 Ibid.
112 Ibid., p. 280.
113 Ibid., p. 275.
114 P. Zagorin, The Court and the Country: The Beginning of the English Revolution
(London, 1969), p. 86.
115 Cust, ‘The “Public Man” ’, pp. 116–43.
116 Hirst, England in Conflict, p, 13.
117 Proceedings in Parliament 1628, Vol. III, p. 280. North was explicit: ‘We are par-
liament men; may speak freely’ (ibid.).
118 Hirst, The Representative of the People?, pp. 7–9, 11–12 and esp. chs. 8–9.
119 Cust, ‘The “Public Man” ’, p. 131; Hirst, England in Conflict, pp. 9–14.
120 Tyacke, ‘Introduction’, p. 12.
121 Underdown, A Freeborn People, pp. 52, 66–7.
that it affected Charles I’s ‘personal and ideological formation’.122As Peter

Lake has shown, by the end of the 1620s there existed ‘two structurally simi-
lar but mutually exclusive conspiracy theories . . . purported to explain the
political difficulties of the period’.123 On the whole, ‘two competing sets of
social and political, as well as religious, priorities and values’ informed ideo-
logical conflict in early seventeenth-century England.124 Those who sided
with the patriots countered the concept of absolute prerogative by resorting to
historical examples that proved Parliament’s ancient status as the fundamen-
tal constitutional organism of the country.
VI
As a consequence of these seditious opinions, Sir Robert Filmer charged,
‘many out of an imaginary fear pretend the power of the people to be neces-
sary for the repressing of the insolencies of tyrants, herein they propound a
remedy far worse than the disease’.125 Above all, this factious doctrine had
engendered ‘the new coined distinction of subjects into royalists and patri-
ots’, which was ‘most unnatural, since the relation between king and people is
so great that their well-being is reciprocal’.126 By appointing themselves to the
role of guardians of the nation, the English patriots claimed to protect the
country from Charles I’s tyrannical government. Their views were fuelled by
the growing interest in radical political literature — a phenomenon that, as
early as May 1622, had led Cambridge booksellers to be examined in consis-
tory courts concerning purchases of Calvinist works of resistance theory such
as the Vindiciae contra Tyrannos, Bucanus’s Loci communes and David
Pareus’s Ad Romanos.127
Together with strongly rejecting resistance theories, Sir Robert had good
reasons to set out a powerful response to the patriotic rhetoric. In particular,
he understood that by proposing an alternative political allegiance the patriots
undermined the unifying role of the monarchy and saw the interest of the
country to be incompatible with the monarch’s. For Filmer the most troubling
implication of their discourse was that it turned freeholders into martyrs of the
122 R. Cust, ‘Charles I and Popularity’, in Politics, Religion and Popularity, ed.
Cogswell, Cust and Lake, pp. 235–58, p. 236.
123 P. Lake, ‘Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice’, in Conflict in Early Stuart
England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603–1642, ed. R. Cust and A. Hughes (Lon-
don and New York, 1989), pp. 72–106, p. 91.
124 Ibid., p. 97.
126 Ibid., p. 5 (italics added).
127 D.D. Brautigam, ‘Prelates and Politics: Uses of “Puritan” 1625–40’, in Puritan-
ism and Its Discontents, ed. Lunger Knoppers, pp. 49–66, p. 64. See also S. Tutino, ‘Hu-
guenots, Jesuits and Tyrants: Notes on the Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos in Early Modern
England’, Journal of Early Modern History, 3 (2007), pp. 175–96.
252 C. CUTTICA
land and dismissed the idea that only an absolute monarchy generated har-
mony in the state. After all, he was writing in the aftermath of the heated
debates which had led to the Petition of Right. In contrast to those who judged
‘a slavish and a dangerous condition to be subject to the will of any one man
who is not subject to the laws’, Filmer invited them to consider that ‘the pre-
rogative of a king is to be above all laws, for the good only of them that are
under the laws, and to defend the people’s liberties — as his majesty
[Charles I] graciously affirmed in his speech after his last answer to the Peti-
tion of Right’.128 In addition, Filmer dismissed all parliamentary pretences of
freedom of speech by remarking that
during the time of parliament those privileges of the House of Commons —
of freedom of speech, power to punish their own members, to examine the
proceedings and demeanour of courts of justice and officers, to have access
to the king’s person and the like — are not due by any natural right, but are
derived from the bounty or indulgence of the king, as appears by a solemn

recognition of the House.129
In this context, Patriarcha’s criticism was addressed to those — ‘the com-
mon people everywhere’ — who set forth the Ciceronian ideal of active citi-
zenship in the respublica.130 Filmer expressed his dismay at the fact that ‘the
king of England is said to be the king of devils, because of his subjects’ often
insurrections against, and depositions of their princes’.131 These subjects pro-
moted the Protestant cause (both at home and abroad); claimed the fundamen-
tal role of a freely-elected parliamentary assembly; stressed their republican
abhorrence of corruption; rejected the absolute prerogative of the king in
favour of constitutional guarantees to limit the arbitrariness of His Majesty’s
authority. Blending godly zeal and civic humanism, the patriot narrative
encouraged the service in office of virtuous Englishmen132 and cast doubt on
the validity of the royal prerogative. Their goal was to centre the identity of
the English nation on the figure of the publicly active ‘honest patriot’ and
freeborn Protestant freeholder. Dismissing the last proposition, Filmer reiter-
ated that ‘the rights or liberties of this or any other nation . . . are derived . . .
from the grace and bounty of princes’.133 He explained that only the king
represented the whole nation since he was the sole true protector of the polity.
The absolute monarch made everyone equal because he was the supreme head
of the body politic. Instead, the opponents of absolute monarchy identified
129 Ibid., pp. 55–6. Again, this passage shows the king-centred nature of all privileges
and liberties rather than a Lockean model of protection of liberty.
130 Cust, ‘ “Patriots” and “Popular” Spirits’, pp. 51–4.
132 On patriotism and office-holding see Condren, Argument and Authority, esp. pp.
149–62.
the ‘people’ exclusively with the greater or richer part of the population.
Although they claimed that the people held ultimate sovereignty, the theorists
of popular power unjustly excluded a large portion of subjects from govern-
ment,134 leaving the polity open to chaos and revolt. The remedy Filmer pro-
posed centred on his idea of absolute and arbitrary sovereignty.
In light of this hostile political climate, Patriarcha was also conceived as
an attempt to regain for the monarchical cause those who had become dissatis-
fied with Charles I’s policies. Hence Filmer illustrated the advantages monar-
chical rule had offered to England in the past and could offer in the future, and
resorted to the patriarchalist paradigm at the heart of which the sovereign
stood out as the caring father of the country. This was his best conceptual
weapon against the rhetorical armoury of the patriots,135 whose opinions
epitomized what Filmer saw as the common people’s intrusion into politics.136
The latter were ‘the natives and patriots of the country’ to whom Henry Bur-
ton’s Truth’s Triumph (1629) referred.137 They embodied the model of the
‘honest patriot’ which Richard Brathwaite’s The English Gentleman (1630)
associated with the republican orators of ancient Greece and Rome. Their role
was one of opposition to the enemies of state and their patriotic deeds aimed
to ‘the safetie and peace’ of the ‘countrey’.138
In reaction to their principles, Filmer forthrightly argued that ‘in a monar-
chy the king must be of necessity above the laws. There can be no sovereign
majesty in him that is under them. That which giveth the very being to a king
is the power to give laws; without this power he is but an equivocal king’.139 In
order to be sovereign the prince had to be legibus solutus. Sovereignty was the
authority to intervene in and modify all political matters. It was strong power
in action. In contradistinction to parliamentary rhetoric, Filmer adopted a
powerful image to underpin the backbone of sovereignty: ‘[t]he people can-
not assemble themselves, but the king, by his writs, calls them to what place
he pleases, and then again scatters them with his breath at an instant, without
any cause showed them than his will’.140 Most importantly, for Filmer the
will of the sovereign and the law coincided. Accordingly, he distinguished
between ‘directive’ and ‘coactive’ power to prove that ‘kings are not bound
134 Ibid., p. 20.
135 Hirst, England in Conflict, pp. 13–14, 117 ff.
136 These were small property householders who stood below the gentry. In the late
1620s in England there was a convergence of interests between commoners and mem-
bers of the gentry on the issue of the extension of the franchise (Hirst, The Representative
of the People?, esp. pp. 75–89; Underdown, A Freeborn People, pp. 53–4; R. Cust and
P. Lake, ‘Sir Richard Grosvenor and the Rhetoric of Magistrates’, Bulletin of the Institute
of Historical Research, 54 (1981), pp. 40–53).
137 H. Burton, Truth’s Triumph (London, 1629), p. 285.
138 R. Brathwaite, The English Gentleman . . . (London, 1630), p. 145 and passim.
140 Ibid., p. 55.
254 C. CUTTICA
by the positive laws of any nation’. While the former represented only the
power of ‘advice and direction which the king’s council gives the king’ (and
as such this was not ‘a law to the king’), the latter was ‘the compulsory power
of laws’ that ‘properly makes laws to be laws’ (and as such implied punish-
ment and obedience).141
The Filmerian concept that the king was ‘lex loquens — a speaking law’142
corresponded to a most eloquent configuration of the voluntarist theory of the
legislative process. This is an important thesis of Patriarcha because it high-
lights that Filmer considered the absolute fatherly sovereign as the only non-
equal in the state. In addition, his concept of the king as lex loquens counter-
attacked the idea of immemorial laws and customs, and the paradigm of the
ancient constitution.143 Through his patriarchalist explanation of the origins
of the body politic, Filmer also rejected the concept of an original community
whose members — as first holders of power — had the right to bypass the
authority of the fatherly king. By placing Adam at the forefront of his political
discourse, he modelled the image of the sovereign as pater patriae.144 In so
doing, he provided a comprehensive explanation of how political communi-
ties formed, and depicted the nation as a patriarchal monarchy in which the
fatherly king personified the body politic. The Filmerian king gave a visible
form to the inviolable nature of the temporal authority of the national sover-
eign.145 Rejecting the attacks of all detractors of the patriotic role of the king,
Patriarcha depicted the sovereign as founder of the state; father of the realm;
creator of the law. The fatherly ruler coincided tout court with the polity and,
therefore, had a stronger interest in safeguarding the nation than the patriots.
141 Ibid., p. 40.

142 Ibid.
143 Hirst, England in Conflict, pp. 23–4.
144 In the secondary literature this argument has been made by J.N. Figgis, The
Divine Right of Kings (Cambridge, 2nd edn., 1914), pp. 149–50. Yet Figgis did not
clarify the intellectual and political context in which Sir Robert employed this metaphor,
nor did he explain against which theories Filmer used it.
145 In articulating this discourse Filmer was in good company. Less systematically,
but in tune with his goals, other early seventeenth-century English absolutists dealt with
the opinions of Jesuits and patriots. Like Patriarcha, their works resorted to the image of
the king as pater patriae. Figgis observed that ‘so widespread a metaphor as that of the
King being pater patriae is sure to be pressed to its full extent by some writers’ (Figgis,
The Divine Right of Kings, p. 152). Among these were e.g. King James VI and I, Richard
Mocket, Samuel Collins, Henry King, Edward Forsett, Robert Sanderson, Sir Francis
Kynaston. On this see C. Cuttica, ‘Sir Francis Kynaston: The Importance of the “Nation”
for a Seventeenth-Century English Royalist’, History of European Ideas, 32 (2006), pp.
139–61.
VII
Confronted by the ideas of Jesuits and patriots, Filmer set out his patriar-
chalist view of sovereignty in such a stringent way that fifty years later his
words still inflamed political debates. Above all, they led one of the most
excellent minds of the century, John Locke, to test his philosophical acumen
and political wit in a lengthy reply. The publication of Patriarcha in 1680 was
the strongest statement that the country had only one ruler and that Parliament
was entirely dependent on the king’s summoning it. The treatise made it clear
that Parliament could be dissolved at any time according to the monarch’s
will. Against those who contested absolute kingly prerogative, Patriarcha
claimed the primary position of the Adamite sovereign. Filmer’s patriar-
chalism was thus a specific discourse within the paradigm of political absolut-
ism, whose goal was to set forth a forceful political image of the king and his
patriotic role as superior pater patriae. This also proves that this work had
nothing to do with the type of controversies in relation to which several schol-

ars read it. In its original meanings and purposes, Patriarcha was conceived
neither as a defence of a particular dynasty, nor as the manifesto of the clergy.
However, even though the question of hereditary succession to the English
throne was not the central issue of Patriarcha, the late seventeenth-century
supporters of the crown adapted Filmer’s patriarchalist theory to their
dynastic goals.146 In a resurgence of ‘royalist patriotism’147 they published
Patriarcha in order to defend the monarchical cause against those who
wanted to prevent the legitimate heir, James, Duke of York, from ascending
the throne. Once more, in the world of polemicists and thinkers the ‘political
groupings’ at odds were courtiers, loyalists and Yorkists on one side, and
countrymen, patriots and republicans on the other.148 This is to say that at the
end of the 1670s the wheel of fortune turned full circle when the issue of the
preservation of the nation came to the fore again. In consequence, Patriarcha
was made public since it enabled monarchists to portray the king as the
fatherly protector of the fatherland. At pains to strengthen the hereditary tie
between the future James II and the country, royalist supporters found in
Filmerism the fiercest defence of monarchical legitimacy against all external
146 Rudolph, Revolution by Degrees, esp. pp. 20–32, 58–61, 63; G. Mahlberg, ‘Re-
publicanism as Anti-Patriarchalism in Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pines (1668)’, in Lib-
erty, Authority, Formality: Political Ideas and Culture, 1600–1900, ed. J. Morrow and
J. Scott (Exeter, 2008), pp. 131–52, p. 142.
147 G. Burgess, ‘Patriotism in English Political Thought, 1530–1660’, in ‘Patria’
und ‘Patrioten’ vor dem Patriotismus, ed. R. von Friedeburg (Wolfenbüttel, 2005), pp.
215–41, p. 237.
148 J. Spurr, The Post-Reformation: Religion, Politics and Society in Britain 1603–1714
(Harlow, 2006), p. 164.
256 C. CUTTICA
pretences to obtain the English crown.149 As a result, this decision provoked

the harshest and most die-hard interpretation of Patriarcha: the Lockean
contractualist view.150
The controversies of the Exclusion Crisis also show that Filmer had singled
out the right target. In fact, in 1681 the royalist historian Robert Brady (and
many others) used exactly the same words as Patriarcha when holding that
‘the Doctrine of disinheriting and deposing Kings, and of the Natural freedom
of the People, is rank Popery: first broached and introduced by the School-
men, and since zealously maintained by the Jesuits and other great Men of the
Papal Faction’.151 Most revealingly, it was the Whigs who — regardless of
their attacks on the Jesuits — in 1688 adopted the very same theory Filmer
had strenuously rejected throughout his treatise:152 this was Robert Parsons’
principle153 that it was legitimate to get rid of a sovereign whose religious
opinions were not in tune with those of his subjects.154 Thus, despite embrac-
ing Sir Robert’s criticism of both ‘Jesuitical’ and ‘Puritanical’ views, his
posthumous adversaries made of him the bogeyman of seventeenth-century
English political thinking. Somewhat ironically though, the misreadings of
which Patriarcha has been victim has turned out to be fruitful: without them,
neither the real patriarchalist Filmer nor the Jacobean and early Caroline con-
texts in which Patriarcha was conceived would ever have been resuscitated.
We now know why to provide a strong answer to the ideas of Jesuits and patri-
ots, and to prompt English royalists to rethink the nature and mechanisms of
149 Condren has pointed out that in 1681 the patriotic Bond of Association (1584)
was used as ‘a template’ for excluding James from the succession and preserving ‘the
Elizabethan Settlement’ (Condren, Argument and Authority, p. 152).
150 Pocock, The Ancient Constitution, pp. 235–6.
151 R. Brady, The Great Point of Succession . . . (London, 1681), p. 38. The late
seventeenth-century female Tory pamphleteer Mary Astell followed the same trajectory
to reconstruct the origins of the ideas of resistance among Catholic and Protestant writers
(M. Astell, ‘An Impartial Enquiry into the Causes of Rebellion and Civil War’, in Mary
Astell: Political Writings, ed. P. Springborg (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 129–97). See also
Pocock, The Ancient Constitution, pp. 213–17.
152 Early instances of opposition to the theories of Jesuit and Puritan thinkers as
expression of the same dangerous principles are Archbishop Bancroft’s Dangerous
Positions (1593) and David Owen’s Herod and Pilate Reconciled: or, the Concord of
Papist and Puritan (1610), which Filmer owned in his library (see the copy of the 1729
inventory of Catalogue of Printed Books sold from East Sutton Park by Arthur Wilson
Filmer at Sotheby’s, London, on 1 October 1945). On English anti-resistance theorists
see J.P. Sommerville, Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideology in England 1603–1640
(London and New York, 2nd edn., 1999), esp. pp. 187–91.
153 Notorious adherents of this theory were the sixteenth-century Leaguers Louis
Dorléans, Jean Boucher and Gulielmus Rossaeus (William Reynolds or Rainolds).
154 T.P. Clancy, Papist Pamphleteers: The Allen-Persons Party and the Political
Thought of the Counter Reformation in England (Chicago, 1964), p. 198; and Sommer-
ville, Royalists and Patriots, passim.
monarchy, Filmer’s configuration of sovereignty was couched in the lan-

guage of patriarchalism.
After all, Peter Heylyn (1659) had stated that Patriarcha ‘might have
served for a Catholicon or General Answer to all Discourses’ supporting
popular power and limited monarchy. Since ‘Catholicon’ commonly indi-
cated a ‘drug or medicine’, which cured all diseases and provided a universal
remedy,155 Heylyn’s claim may be that Patriarcha was a solution and a
response to faulty political reasoning of all kinds. Locke had been warned.
Cesare Cuttica156 UNIVERSITÉ PARIS 8 — VINCENNES

155 P. Heylyn, Certamen Epistolare . . . (London, 1659), p. 208.

156 The author would like to thank Dario Castiglione, Janelle Greenberg, Knud
Haakonssen, Iain Hampsher-Monk, Robert Lamb, Julia Rudolph, Johann Sommerville,
Richard Whatmore and the two anonymous reviewers for comments and suggestions on
this text, and Ken Goodwin for revising its prose. Dates are given with the year beginning
on 1 January.

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REPUTATION VERSUS CONTEXT IN THE

INTERPRETATION OF SIR ROBERT FILMER’S PATRIARCHA

of the succession crisis of the 1680s — has prevented an appropriate contex-

when he composed his much deplored work.

One further aspect informing this portrait of Filmer’s patriarchalist principles

8 One underlying implication of the present piece is that Patriarcha responded to a

they important only in connection with the discussions surrounding the

of publications it was conceived; whether it responded to a particular target

divinity’.18 Filmer, however, made it clear that ‘divines . . . of the reformed

17 R. Filmer, ‘Patriarcha: The Naturall Power of Kinges Defended against the

one to which he did not hesitate to give overwhelming importance21 — was

concerning both papist influence in England and ‘Puritan’ adherence to resis-

21 Filmer’s remarks on the increasing presence of rebellious forces in the country

calamitous ideas of puritan and quasi-republican thinkers that the people

controversy over the Oath of Allegiance (1606).31 Thus, Patriarcha’s criti-

‘Petition of Parliament against the Catholics’ — presented to the King — both

Majesty’s loyal and religious subjects’.35 The implication that Catholics —

instrument conceded to the people stemmed from the rebellious doctrines of

their principles were identified with the promotion of an external political

39 R. Sibthorpe, Apolostike Obedience Shewing the Duty of Subjects to pay Tribute

theory of church-state relations of Suaréz, Bellarmine, and other intellectual

justifying that ‘pestilent and dangerous conclusion’ whereby ‘the multitude

depicted these political entities as legitimated by the original fatherly power

embodied in Adam.55 While Bellarmine saw the fragmentation of the prime

especially in a period when the Stuart government implemented unpopular

eign-turned-tyrant so as to preserve their liberties.78

divided.82 In anti-Stuart circles Buckingham became the byword for foreign

private interest. Insisting on the instructive example of classical history,

understand it, so a prince though of a duller understanding, by use and experi-

88 Filmer, ‘Patriarcha’, p. 31.

on the overriding importance of fatherly recognition of people’s liberties

King feared that the Commons’ request of an explanation ‘will hazard an

atmosphere which saw the parliamentary Petition of Right addressed to

that it affected Charles I’s ‘personal and ideological formation’.122As Peter

derived from the bounty or indulgence of the king, as appears by a solemn

141 Ibid., p. 40.

nothing to do with the type of controversies in relation to which several schol-

pretences to obtain the English crown.149 As a result, this decision provoked

monarchy, Filmer’s configuration of sovereignty was couched in the lan-

Cesare Cuttica156 UNIVERSITÉ PARIS 8 — VINCENNES

155 P. Heylyn, Certamen Epistolare . . . (London, 1659), p. 208.

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