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The date of Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

John M. Wallace
John M. Wallace
Affiliation:
The University of Chicago
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Extract

In Gordon J. Schochet's new book on Patriarchalism in political thought (New York, 1975) there is one thirty-year-old assumption that he should have challenged. Our estimate of Filmer's place in political thought and the relation of his ideas to his contemporaries’ depends to some extent on the date at which he is presumed to have written Patriarcha, and Schochet has unquestioningly accepted Peter Laslett's dating of the work in the late 1630s, or at the very latest before the outbreak of civil war in 1642. The New Cambridge bibliography of English literature, without any explanation, gives the date as 1635. It was not always so. Edmund Bohun, Filmer's first editor, thought Patriarcha was written in 1642, and James Tyrell, one of his early detractors, began his attack with the assumption that Patriarcha was the culmination of Filmer's work and contained his ‘most mature thoughts’. The implausibility of a date in the thirties seems recently to have escaped everyone's notice, probably because we are all immensely indebted to Laslett not only for finding the best text of Patriarcha at East Sutton Park in 1939 but for editing it with a scholarly introduction ten years later.

Type
Communications
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , March 1980 , pp. 155 - 165
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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References

1 Laslett, Peter (ed.), Patriarcha and other political works of Sir Robert Filmer (Oxford, 1949), pp. 3, 44–6, 95 n. References to Patriarcha, the other political works, and to Laslett's introduction have been incorporated into the text of this essay. All page numbers occurring in parentheses without further identification refer to Laslett's edition.Google Scholar

2 The power of kings: and in particular of the king of England (London, 1680), sig. A2.Google Scholar

3 Patriarcha non monarcha (London, 1681), pp. 1–2.Google Scholar

4 ‘The gentry of Kent in 1640’, Cambridge Historical Journal, ix (1947–9), 148–64. and ‘Sir Robert Filmer: the man versus the Whig myth’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, V (1948), 523–46. Other commentary on Filmer in recent years has been sparse, but the following should be mentioned: Perez Zagorin, A history of political thought in the English revolution (London, 1954), esp. pp. 196–201Google Scholar; Gough, J. W., Fundamental law in English constitutional history (Oxford, 1955), pp. 117–20Google Scholar; Pocock, J. G. A., The ancient constitution and the feudal law (Cambridge, 1957), see indexGoogle Scholar; Greenleaf, W. H., Order, empiricism and politics (Oxford, 1966), pp. 80–94, and ‘Filmer's patriarchal history’, The Historical Journal, ix (1966), 157–71; Quentin Skinner, ‘The ideological context of Hobbes's political thought’, The Historical Journal, ix (1966), esp. 298–301Google Scholar; Yolton, John W. (ed.), John Locke: problems in perspective (Cambridge, 1969)Google Scholar, see index. Hinton, R. W. K., ‘Husbands, fathers and conquerors’, Political Studies, xv (1967), 291–300, and xvi (1968), 55–67. Dr Hinton's article has important implications for a study of the role of natural obligation in seventeenth-century political thought that we do not yet possess. Older studies such as Neville Figgis, The divine right of kingsGoogle Scholar, ed. Elton, G. R. (New York, 1965), and Margaret Judson, The crisis of the constitution (New Brunswick, NJ., 1949), are still worth consulting on Filmer.Google Scholar

5 ‘Sir Robert Filmer: some new bibliographic discoveries’, The Library, xxvi (1971), 140, 152. The MS, the call number of which is Codex MS 413, was bought in 1929 for two guineas from Dobell's catalogue 81, item 1046. It is bound in vellum and contains 108 pages of text. Microfilms of the Cambridge and Chicago MSS have recently been exchanged by the two university libraries.

6 ‘Sir Robert Filmer’, pp. 156–69. Filmer's passing reference to Grotius in a later chapter (Laslett edn, p. 81) was also an addition to the Cambridge MS as it does not occur in the first edn or the Chicago MS.

7 Apparently during the composition of the Chicago MS. The table of contents at the beginning of the MS omits ‘of his Council’; the second table of contents before chapter 3 contains the phrase. Laslett's note in this section (p. 112, n. 2) reverses the facts: the bracketed sentence does not occur in the Cambridge MS but is present in both the 1680 edn and the Chicago MS.

8 The ‘Heads of Discourse’ which Laslett has interpolated into the text of his edn (Filmer's MS has only roman numerals in the margins referring to the ‘Heads’ listed at the front of the volume) are useful in one way but give a quite different appearance to the page from the 1680 edn and the Chicago MS, and they obscure the tripartite division of the argument. However, Filmer obtained his ‘Heads’ by transcribing the former table of contents, with Occasional small variations. No scholar has paid the slightest attention to the 1680 edn since.the publication of Laslett's edn, but in fact it conveys Filmer’s original intentions more accurately than the Cambridge MS. The exception is an edition of the 1680 text and large sections of Locke's First treatise entitled La polemica Filmer-Locker [sic] sobre la obediencia politico, ed. Carmela Gutierrez de Gambra, with an introduction by Rafael Gambra (Madrid, 1966).

9 A point made perhaps too emphatically by Allen, J. W., ‘Sir Robert Filmer’, in The social and political ideas of some English thinkers of the Augustan age, ed. Hearnshaw, F. J. C. (London, 1938), p. 46: ‘What is called his patriarchal theory was, in fact, an argument from history. It was, I admit, a shockingly bad one; but it was not in the least essential to his system of ideas.’ A much subtler analysis of the defects of Filmer's patriarchalism is to be found in Hinton, ‘Husbands, fathers and conquerors’, part I, pp. 298 300.Google Scholar

10 In view of the fact that Filmer was willing to take the Engagement, his statement in Anarchy can be taken literally that‘in such cases [of usurpation] the subjects’ obedience to the fatherly power must go along and wait upon God's providence, who only hath right to give and take away kingdoms, and thereby to adopt subjects into the obedience of another fatherly power ‘(p. 289). This was Ascham's argument in 1648, not the royalists’.

11 This is an important exception, nevertheless, which is discussed by Schochet in Patriarchalism, pp. 6, 14–16, 38, 42, 47, 73–74, 78–81.

12 If we accept Thomason's date of 21 August, but the Huntington Library copy of The power of kings (call no. 827744) is dated 6 April 1648. The earlier date leaves the whole summer dear for the composition of Patriarcha. A few scholars have expressed surprise that Filmer appeared to dislike the argument from conquest, but by 1648 it had become a highly unpleasant topic to the royalists.

13 Pride's purge: politics in the puritan revolution (Oxford, 1971), p. 96.Google Scholar

14 Ibid. p 3.

15 Gardiner, S. R., History of the great civil war 1642–1649 (London, 1886–91), III, 449, 469.Google Scholar

16 The unsystematic quality of Filmer's thought (‘clumsy gropings’) has been emphasized by Dunn, John, The political thought of John Locke (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 58–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 ‘The Chancellor and the Justices of the Bench should follow the King, [etc.].‘Laslett edn, pp. 110–11.

18 An essay entitled ‘John Dryden's plays and the conception of an heroic society’, to be published in a collection of Clark Library lectures edited by Perez Zagorin.

19 This is the conclusion to chapter I in the first edn and the Chicago MS (Laslett edn, p 63).