History, Filmerian Patriarchalism and Exclusion Royalism

Abstract

There is an assumption in scholarship focused on seventeenth-century English political thought that the political ideology constructed by royalists writing during the Exclusion Crisis was similar to Robert Filmer's patriarchalism. This paper contests this assumption by focusing on the inconsistencies between Filmer's view of history and that of the Exclusion royalists. Filmer's Adamic history necessitated a static conception of sovereignty that placed virtually no limits on the monarch. Exclusion royalists, however, adopted a fluid and changing view of sovereignty that placed limitations on monarchical power and was motivated by histories grounded in the ancient constitution or the conquest of 1066.