Robert Filmer

Robert Filmer was born in 1588 at East Sutton, in Kent, England, the eldest son of a landowning family. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, without taking a degree, and at Lincoln's Inn in London, and he was knighted by King James I in 1619. He spent most of his life managing his estate at East Sutton. Filmer was a firm royalist, and during the English Civil War he was imprisoned for some years in Leeds Castle, and his estates were seized. In Patriarcha, written probably in the 1620s or 1630s but not published until 1680, long after his death, he argued that kings rule by divine right, inheriting their authority from the first father, Adam, to whom God gave power over the world, and that subjects therefore owe them obedience as children owe obedience to fathers. When Patriarcha was published, it was used to support the royal cause, and John Locke wrote the first of his Two Treatises of Government to refute it. Filmer died at East Sutton in 1653.

Robert Filmer is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Faith not well documented; he wrote against Calvinist teaching on blasphemy. Source: Wikipedia