John Prideaux

The fourth son of John and Agnes Prideaux, he was born at Stowford House in the parish of Harford, near Ivybridge, Devon, England, on 17 September 1578.

His parents had to provide for a family of twelve; John, however, attracted the attention of a wealthy friend, Lady Fowell, of the same parish, and was sent to Oxford at eighteen.

On 17 July 1614, he was collated to the vicarage of Bampton, Oxfordshire, and 8 December 1615 was appointed Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University in succession to Robert Abbot; to this office a canonry of Christ Church was annexed.

To young Gilbert Sheldon, who first at Oxford denied that the Pope was Antichrist, he replied with a joke; and his quarrel with Peter Heylyn, whom in 1627 he denounced as a 'Bellarminian,' for maintaining the supremacy of the church in matters of faith, was amicably settled in 1633 by the mediation of William Laud.

On the other hand, Laud respected him, and asked him in 1636 to revise William Chillingworth's Religion of Protestants, and he always remained one of the royal chaplains.

[2] Prideaux was one of the miscellaneous theologians summoned by the lords' committee 1 March 1641, to meet in the Jerusalem Chamber and discuss plans of church reform under the lead of John Williams.

He never attended any of its meetings, and, returning to Worcester, gradually identified himself with the royalists; so that in the list of the Assembly in the ordinance of June 1643 his name no longer appears.

Deprived of what remained to him of the episcopal estates, he sought a refuge with his son-in-law, Dr Henry Sutton, rector of Bredon, Worcestershire.

Richard Montagu, one of Laud's supporters, called him ‘that jackanapes’ and ‘the Bedlam of Exeter’, hardly complimentary things to say about one of Oxford's most renowned heads of house.

There was an unusually high presence of staunch Protestants at Exeter, and its reputation as anti-Laudian was clear (it was the only college not to have its altar in the position required by the Laudian statutes).

Prideaux's position at the apex of the College allowed his influence to permeate every aspect of its life, academic and religious, and Exeter's appeal as a centre of Protestant scholarship must have stemmed in large part from him.