Irish origins, this branch of which had married one of the heiresses of the prominent and wealthy Fleming family of Bratton Fleming in Devon. Career Froude matriculated at Exeter College, Oxford, on 30 May 1797, aged 19, and obtained the degree of BA in 1801. His father died in 1803 and in 1804 he was appointed by his mother, patroness of the living, as Rector of Knowstone-cum-Molland, in place of his father. According to Baring-Gould: "(John Froude II) had been well educated, and was a graduate of Oxford University. It is said that he had met with great disappointment in love, and early in life retired into what was, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, the great retirement from the world of culture and intellectual activity, Knowstone-cum-Molland". Froude was appointed Rector of Molland-cum-Knowstone by his widowed mother in 1804, to replace his deceased father in that position, and remained there until his death in 1852. He spent most of his time hunting with his own pack of hounds, and shooting birds. According to Baring-Gould: "Froude's church preferment was at the time valuable, and he was, moreover, in possession of some considerable private fortune in addition to his professional income. He had few educated people residing in his neighbourhood. With the quiet, inoffensive clergy about he would not associate; with others he could not, as they held themselves aloof from him. He soon came to associate almost entirely with the rough farmers who inhabited the Exmoor district, and he grew to resemble them in mind, language, habits of life and dress. From them he was principally differentiated by his native wit, his superior education, and his exceeding wickedness". He had several run-ins with his nemesis Henry Phillpotts, Bishop of Exeter 1830 to 1869, which are recorded humorously in several near-contemporary sources. Phillpotts was a determined persecutor of clerics who were not wholly focussed on serving their parish as ministers of religion, and tried to abolish the country squire lifestyle followed by many clerics within his diocese of Devon and Cornwall. However Froude's position as rector was for life, his father having been the patron, and the bishop had little power over him. When the bishop at last decided to visit Froude in person to appeal to him to desist from his hunting lifestyle, Froude employed various ruses to foil him, from digging up the road to trap the bishop's carriage,