# Algernon Sidney and John Locke: How Two Men Answered Filmer and Armed a Revolution

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/consequential-actions-podcast-7101158/algernon-sidney-and-john-locke-how-two-men-answered-filmer-and-armed-a-revolution
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/consequential-actions-podcast-7101158/algernon-sidney-and-john-locke-how-two-men-answered-filmer-and-armed-a-revolution.md
Podcast: [Consequential Actions Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/consequential-actions-podcast-7101158)
Published: 2026-08-15T03:49:40+00:00
Episode link: https://jeffkellick.substack.com/p/algernon-sidney-and-john-locke-how
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/211260907/2306695fa8b9ea0e0d6e58bd21e45eb1.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/consequential-actions-podcast-7101158/episodes/algernon-sidney-and-john-locke-how-two-men-answered-filmer-and-armed-a-revolution
Duration seconds: 3175

## Resource

They Executed Him for a Book Nobody Had Read On the twenty-first of November, 1683, a sixty-year-old man stood at the bar of the Court of King’s Bench charged with high treason, without counsel, because English law did not permit a man accused of treason to have any. The crown had one witness to the plot, and the law required two. So the prosecution reached for the manuscript its officers had carried out of his study that summer — long, unfinished, unpublished, read by almost no one on earth. The Lord Chief Justice, George Jeffreys, instructed the jury in three words of Latin. Scribere est agere. To write is to act. Two weeks later they cut off Algernon Sidney’s head on Tower Hill for a book the crown never proved anyone had circulated. That same autumn, another Englishman was living in Amsterdam under the assumed name of Doctor van der Linden, in poor health, fifty-one years old, with the English government asking after him. John Locke had been the confidential adviser to the leader of the Exclusion movement, and when that movement collapsed and its leaders began going to the block, his position was not survivable. He stayed abroad more than five years. The manuscript he carried into exile was published anonymously at the end of 1689, and he admitted the authorship only in a codicil to his will. Both men were writing against the same dead opponent. Sir Robert Filmer had died in 1653, but Patriarcha was published in 1680, in the middle of the Exclusion Crisis, and it made a dead man’s book into a live weapon. This episode states Filmer’s case at full strength before answering it, because an argument answered in its weakest form has not been answered at all — and his hard question has never entirely gone away. When, exactly, did you consent? Where is this original agree…

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## Transcript

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