Rector and Regius Professor
Prideaux was admitted B.D. on 6 May 1611, and on 4 April 1612 he was elected Rector of Exeter College, and was permitted to take the degree of D.D. 30 May 1612, before the statutable period. Exeter was then fifth college numerically in the university, and attracted not only west-countrymen, but also foreign students. Prideaux built on its reputation for scholarship. Philip Cluverius and D. Orville the geographers, James Casaubon and Sixtinus Amama were among the Northern Europeans and others who studied under him. Robert Spottiswoode and James, Duke of Hamilton, were among his Scottish pupils. Prideaux added to the buildings of the college: a new chapel was built in 1624, and consecrated (5 October) with a sermon by him. Anthony Ashley Cooper, his pupil from 1636 to 1638, records that he could be just and kindly to excitable undergraduates.
After the death of Prince Henry in 1612, Prideaux was appointed chaplain to the King. 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 Universuty in succession to Robert Abbot; to this office a canonry of Christ Church was annexed. He received subsequently the vicarage of Chalgrove, Oxfordshire, in 1620, a canonry in Salisbury Cathedral 17 June 1620, the rectory of Bladon in 1625, and the rectory of Ewelme, Oxfordshire, in 1629.
Prideaux was in post as Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University (a one year position at the time) five times: from July 1619 to July 1621, July 1624 to 1626, and from 7 October 1641 to 7 February 1643, although in absentia at the end of his office. In his first year of office, he had to intervene in the dispute raging in Jesus College as to the election of a Principal. In defiance of the fellows, he installed Francis Mansell, the nominee of Lord Pembroke, then chancellor, and expelled most of the dissentients.
It was as Regius Professor of Divinity that Prideaux came most into contact with actual politics. For 26 years, he had to preside at theological disputations, in which the unorthodox found supporters. He maintained throughout a conservative position, without altogether alienating the extremists. 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. In 1617, a similar difficulty with Daniel Featley had been composed by the help of George Abbot. His attitude towards Arminian views was unfriendly. 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.
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