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. Later life 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. In the autumn Charles, in filling the five vacant sees, promoted four bishops and appointed Prideaux to the fifth, that of Worcester. Prideaux was consecrated on 19 December 1641, and installed a few weeks later; he was thus engaged at Worcester when Williams and his eleven colleagues assembled to make their protest, 29 December, and so escaped impeachment. He was one of the three peers, all bishops, who dissented when the bill for excluding the spiritual peers from parliament was read a third time, 5 February 1642. That the commons were not hostile to Prideaux was shown by his nomination as one of the Westminster Assembly in April 1642. He never attended any of its meetings, and, returning to Worcester, gradually identified