Filmer is mainly remembered as the target of the Two Treatises of Government by Locke. He was a country gentleman of Kent, whose Patriarcha (1630) rests political obligation to the state on its divinely ordained authority, descending to current royalty from the patriarchal sovereignty that Adam was given over his family. In spite of Locke’s description of the doctrine as ‘glib nonsense’, it formed an important object of concern to him.