Sometime before (or on) 8 February 1632, Robert Filmer (1588– 1653) presented for the consideration of King Charles I a work entitled A Discourse … of government in praise of Royaltie. Filmer needed the crown's permission by way of a licence to proceed with the publication of his tract. Accordingly, the King's secretary, Georg Weckherlin, asked Charles whether the book ought to be published. It seems likely that this work was an early version of what became known as Patriarcha, which posits that the divine origins of monarchical government are found in the patriarchal rulership of Adam. Why Filmer would have written such a work at this time is difficult to say with any precision, and Filmer's Discourse did not make it into the public eye for almost another fifty years. When it finally did appear in 1680, it provoked responses from numerous Whig and anti-royalist figures, including Algernon Sidney (1623–83), who pejoratively labelled Filmer a ‘servant’ of the King. James Tyrrell (1642–1718), in his 1681 Patriarcha non Monarcha, was more moderate in his criticism, suggesting that Filmer's arguments gave ‘too much advantage to the Enemies of Kingship’ by ‘[inflaming] Distemper’. Another fierce response, and certainly the most famous, came from John Locke. In Locke's 1689 preface to his Two Treatises of Government, he wrote scathingly of his philosophical adversary: ‘For if any one will be at the Pains himself’, writes Locke, ‘… [to] endeavour to reduce his Words to direct, positive, intelligible Propositions … he will quickly be satisfied there was never so much glib Nonsense put together in well sounding English.’

Filmer is almost exclusively remembered as the person whom Locke attacked in Two Treatises, whereas Locke secured a central place in the anglophone liberal tradition. Adam Seligman and James Davison Hunter both point to Locke as a ‘key transitional theorist’ in the emergence of the Reformed–Enlightenment synthesis which held together the liberal democratic ideal. The claim of this chapter is rather different, and it is not strictly related to the question of a putative synthesis between Reformed thought and Enlightenment ideals.