Monarchist Profile: Sir Robert Filmer

One of the most well known literary defenders of the British monarchy during the time of the English Civil Wars was Sir Robert Filmer, although some have since argued that he is more known by those who endeavored to refute him than he was on his own merits. Nonetheless, he put forward what is now one of the better known arguments in favor of paternalistic absolute monarchy, based on the Divine Right of Kings and in opposition to the liberal supporters of Parliament. I will admit that he is probably my favorite political theorist of his time and place and one I would certainly be more in agreement with than someone like Thomas Hobbes (whom Filmer actually criticized). Little Bobby Filmer was the son of Sir Edward Filmer, a native of Kent, and was born sometime in 1588. He studied at Cambridge and was knighted by King Charles I. An ardent royalist, he supported the King in his disputes with Parliament and Filmer suffered dearly for it. He was captured and thrown in the dungeon at Leeds Castle in 1643 and had his home vandalized by the Parliamentarians no less than ten times. Obviously, not the sort of experiences that would be inclined to endear him to the cause of liberalism.

Filmer wrote extensively in support of the monarchy on the battleground of political theory and also occasionally wrote criticisms of other theorists, philosophers and religions (he did not like Calvinists -not monarchist enough, and he did not like Catholics who were sufficiently monarchist but their loyalty to the Pope made them suspect). Although not the sort of total authoritarian that Hobbes was, Filmer was definitely an advocate of absolute monarchy, no doubt about it. In fact, were he alive today, Filmer would hardly recognize any western monarchy as being a monarchy at all as he was totally opposed to limited, mixed or what would later be known as constitutional monarchy. Royal authority had to be absolute and unfettered according to Filmer for several basic reasons; because justice can only be imposed, it cannot be self-administered; because all power is absolute according to natural law and because monarchs have inherited a divine right that no one on earth has authority to take from them. According to Filmer, democracy was chaos; at best only one step away from anarchy and even mixed government was trending in the wrong direction because it implied that Parliament had at least some power over the King or that there were powers they had which the King could not revoke.

One of the things I like about Filmer is that he challenged problems and hypocrisies in the liberal democratic/republican model that are seemingly obvious but rarely addressed. For example; why does everyone assume democracy to be an absolute good when virtually everyone also agrees that democracy is dangerous, inefficient and inevitably fails? Why is it wrong for the King to have power instead of ‘the people’ but it is okay for some people to have power and not others. After all, at least at that time, even the most radical liberals who championed the cause of “the people” never for a minute considered “the people” to include women, children, criminals, slaves or the retarded for that matter. In short, if it was “unfair” for the King to have power but not “the people”, why was it “fair” for men to have power and not women? Was it “unfair” that adults should have more power than children? One cannot help but be reminded of how, during the period of the American Revolutionary War, Samuel Johnson wondered why the loudest yelps for liberty came from slave owners like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

As a basis for his support of absolute monarchy, Filmer went back to the origins of humanity and the Old Testament of the Bible. He noted, in his most famous work, that the very first governments in the Bible were patriarchies. This was the rule of a father over his family and, given how long Biblical figures lived, they could come to rule quite a large group of families. Filmer reasoned that there was no real difference between a family patriarch and a royal monarch. A family, expanded to a clan, expanded to a tribe, expanded to a nation and patriarchs inevitably became lords, chieftains and kings. So, the rule of a king over his subjects was no different than the rule of a father over his family. He noted that, in the Bible, fathers had absolute power, even of life and death, over their families and yet, because of the paternalistic nature of the relationship, this was not oppressive or negative.

Filmer writes that the original patriarch was Adam, the first man and the one given dominion over the whole world by God. This authority passed eventually from Adam to Noah. Filmer, taking the Biblical story of the flood literally (I add only because believing that the Bible actually means what it says is so novel a concept today) he also held to the theory that Noah sailed with the ark through the Mediterranean and passed his authority over the world to his three sons by granting each dominion over one of the three continents of the ancient world. It was from these three patriarchs, Filmer argued, that all others descend and their descendants eventually becoming the lords, chieftains, princes and finally kings of the nations. Thus, Filmer believed in absolute monarchy as the system established by God, starting with Adam and the commandment for children to obey their parents. It should be noted however that not all royalists were in agreement with Filmer on this point, he was certainly on the side favoring an absolute monarch and rejecting limited monarchy as well as democracy.

Filmer died on May 26, 1653 and many of his most famous works were not widely published until after his death, in part so that they could be refuted by liberal writers of the time. What is interesting is that this coincided with the 1688 revolution and the downfall of the House of Stuart. The works of Filmer were dug up and passed around as examples of royalist villainy; the frightening absolutism of those who believed in the Divine Right of Kings. That is, of course, what King James II believed and those supporting the preeminence of Parliament seized on the writings of Filmer to justify their own position; that the King answers to Parliament rather than Parliament answering to the King. One can only guess what Filmer himself would have thought about his work being used in this way, especially since the monarch who held to the Divine Right of Kings that Filmer so defended also belonged to a Church that Filmer most adamantly opposed.