Was born at East Sutton. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. He wrote several remarkable works on Government, the chief of which were "The Anarchy ​of a Limited and Mixed Monarchy" and "Patriarcha," in which he endeavours to prove that all legal titles to govern are orginally derived from heads of families. One of the charges against Algernon Sidney was that there was found in his posession a MS. answer to this latter treatise, the principles of which were subsequently discussed by Locke in his Treatises on Government, in 1689. Filmer died in 1688.

[See "Wotton's Baronetage," (1771), "Hasted's Kent," "Hallam's Literature of Europe."]