Filmer: 'Patriarcha' and Other Writings

Recent scholarship has raised and re-opened some important questions of authorship and dating connected with Filmer. Firstly, the date of composition of Patriarcha has been variously set at years ranging from 1631 or earlier to 1648 or later. Secondly, the ascription of The Free-holders Grand Inquest to Filmer has been challenged, and it has been suggested that it is in fact by Sir Robert Holborne, a lawyer who defended John Hampden in the famous Ship Money trial of 1637–8 but who became a royalist in the Civil War. Thirdly, some anonymous seventeenth-century works of political theory have been attributed to Filmer. Each of these three topics deserves brief discussion here. On the first, see also p. viii above.

THE DATE OF FILMER'S PATRIARCHA

In the introduction to his Patriarcha and Other Political Works of Sir Robert Filmer (Oxford 1949), p. 3, Peter Laslett suggested that Patriarcha was written between 1635 and 1642. He argued that it must have been written after 1635, since the Cambridge manuscript ‘quotes Selden's Mare Clausum, which was published in that year’; and that it dates from before the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642, since the Cambridge manuscript (unlike the printed versions of 1680 and later) refers to only two civil wars in English history – the Barons' Wars and the Wars of the Roses (p. 34 below). The 1680 edition added a reference to a third war, namely ‘the late rebellion’ – that is to say, the Civil War.