Sir Robert Filmer (c. 1588 – 26 May 1653) was an English political theorist who defended the divine right of kings.

On 8 August 1618, he married Anne Heton in St Leonard's Church in London, with their first child baptised in February 1620.

Filmer was investigated by the county committee on suspicion of supporting the King, though no firm evidence was uncovered.

[4] The fullest expression of Filmer's thoughts is found in Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings, published posthumously in 1680, but probably begun in the 1620s and almost certainly completed before the Civil War began in 1642.

[5] According to Christopher Hill, "The whole argument of ... Patriarcha, and of his works published earlier in the 1640s and 1650s, is based on Old Testament history from Genesis onwards".

In line with its title, it attacks several political classics, the De jure belli ac pacis of Grotius, the Defensio pro Populo Anglicano of John Milton, and the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes.

There is no nation that allows children any action or remedy for being unjustly governed; and yet, for all this, every father is bound by the law of nature to do his best for the preservation of his family.

A proof unanswerable for the superiority of princes above laws is this, that there were kings long before there were any laws.The difficulty inherent in judging the validity of claims to power by men who claim to be acting upon the "secret" will of God was disregarded by Filmer, who held that it altered in no way the nature of such power, based on the natural right of a supreme father to hold sway.

Nine years after the publication of Patriarcha, at the time of the Revolution which banished the Stuarts from the throne, John Locke singled out Filmer among the advocates of Divine Right and attacked him expressly in the first part of the Two Treatises of Government.

[4] Filmer's patriarchal monarchism was also the target of Algernon Sidney in his Discourses Concerning Government and of James Tyrrell in his Patriarcha non-monarcha.

John Kenyon, in his study of British political debate from 1689 to 1720, claimed that "any unbiased study of the position shows in fact that it was Filmer, not Hobbes, Locke or Sidney, who was the most influential thinker of the age.... Filmer's influence can be measured by the fact that both Locke ... and Sidney ... were not so much [making] independent and positive contributions to political thought as elaborate refutations of his Patriarcha, written soon after its first publication.

In 1705 the non-juror Charles Leslie devoted twelve successive issues of the weekly Rehearsal to explaining Filmer's doctrines and published them in a volume.

He died in 1668 and the East Sutton estate passed to his brother Robert who was created a baronet in 1674 in honour of their father's loyalty to the Crown.

Filmer's third son, Samuel, married Mary Horsmanden and lived in Virginia Colony[13] before dying childless soon after.