PRICE, John (c.1620-88), of Gellihir, Ilston, Glam. and East Barnet, Herts.

The Price family of Gellihir, a house in Ilston, in the Gower peninsula, was anciently settled in west Glamorgan. Unlike the Prices of Briton Ferry, to whom the family was related, the cadet branch at Gellihir provided no sheriffs or justices of the peace to county government before John Price’s time. At the start of the civil war, John Price’s mother, and others of the family, doubtless including John, left Ilston for Devon, to escape the royalist forces loyal to the landlord of Gower, Henry Somerset, 5th earl of Worcester.22CCAM, 2178. A cousin, John Price of nearby Cwrt-y-Carnau, served in the king’s army as a captain, but John Price of Gellihir seems never to have taken up arms.23NLW, LL/MB/17, p. 49. He returned to Glamorgan in 1645, and became a close political associate of Colonel Philip Jones, who quickly became the most significant figure in the parliamentarian administration of Glamorgan, and indeed in south Wales as a whole. One of Price’s sisters had married Philip Jones, while another was the wife of Evan Lewis*, and the trio of Jones, Price and Lewis wielded a great deal of power in civilian government and the garrisons of Cardiff and Swansea. As a civilian, Price was appointed to various local government offices, becoming sheriff of Glamorgan just before the purge of Parliament in December 1648 and the consequent trial and execution of the king.

In February 1650, Price was named a commissioner for propagating the gospel in Wales, and was treasurer of the commission in south Wales. He was a core member of the body in south Wales, attending meetings in Brecon, Neath, Swansea, Monmouth and Pembroke.24LPL, Comm. VIII/1. Because John Miles founded the first Baptist church in Wales at Ilston immediately before the propagation commission was established, it has been assumed that Price was a significant figure in that development. He took the tenancy of the rectory of Ilston, at Miles’s request, and naturally enough as a prominent inhabitant of that parish, and as treasurer was responsible for payments to Miles as one of the ministers sponsored by the commission.25E113/2, answer of John Price. However, there is no evidence that he ever joined the Baptist church meeting at Ilston, so the most that can be said about his involvement with it was that he was in sympathy with the principle of a state-supported godly ministry, and perhaps with the principle of gathered churches.26The Ilston Bk. ed. B. G. Owens (Aberystwyth, 1996). Local knowledge and importance accounted for his appointment with Bussy Mansel as surveyor of the lordship of Gower, recently bestowed on Oliver Cromwell*, in 1650.27Surveys Gower and Kilvey, 1. In June 1651, Price was named to the high court of justice sitting in judgment on the rebels defeated in Cardiganshire by Rowland Dawkins*. As a core member of Philip Jones’s cabal in south Wales, with Dawkins and Lewis he smoothly transferred his allegiance from the Rump to the army-sponsored regime after April 1653, and in October that year, was first named among the Glamorgan judges on the cases of poor debtors in prison.

It was on the strength of Jones’s interest at Cardiff castle that Price was elected to the Parliament of 1654. He was named to a total of four committees in his first session, on the protectorate recognition bill (25 Sept., with Jones), and the bill for ejecting scandalous ministers (the same day); he had recently been made a commissioner for that purpose in south Wales.28CJ vii. 370a. His other committee nominations were on chancery reform (5 Oct.); and on the scrutiny of public accounts and the forgery of debentures (22 Nov.).29CJ vii. 374a, 387b. On three of these four committees he was accompanied by another Gower man and key figure in Philip Jones’s entourage, Rowland Dawkins, who became, in effect the major-general for south Wales during the emergency of 1655-6. Price helped Philip Jones procure the new borough charter for Swansea, and was named a member of the town’s common council in February 1656 as a consequence.

Re-elected to the second protectorate Parliament later that year, he was named with his brothers-in-law Jones and Evan Lewis to the committee on the lord protector's safety (26 Sept.), on a bill for the better management of revenues from the sequestered estates of papists (22 Oct.) and a new indemnity bill for public servants (31 Mar. 1657).30CJ vii. 374a, 444a, 516a. Price was also included in delegations to consult with the protector over changes to the constitution, including over Oliver Cromwell’s* ‘doubts and scruples’ (27 Mar., 7, 9 Apr.).31CJ vii. 514a, 521a,b. On these visits to Cromwell, Price was invariably accompanied by Philip Jones. It is probable that Price was one of the commissioners for the security of the protector named in November 1656, an appointment which built on his judicial experience in 1651 and 1653, as well as on his recent involvement with drafting the legislation which brought that commission into being.

After his third election in 1659, Price was on the first day of the Parliament, alongside Dawkins, made a commissioner to administer the oath to Members, helping to swear the first four, and swearing himself among the next four (27 Jan.).32CJ vii. 593a,b. If Price made a speech in any of his three Parliaments, it went unrecorded by the diarist Thomas Burton*. As such a committed and conspicuous Cromwellian, he was excluded, like Philip Jones and Rowland Dawkins, from the Glamorgan militia commission of July 1659 under the revived Rump Parliament. In that assembly he was identified, with Evan Lewis, Dawkins and William Watkins*, as one of the ‘agents, instruments and adherents’ of Philip Jones.33Glam. Archives, D/DF l/5. Between 1656 and July 1659 he stood with Jones as party to deeds by which Jones amassed the estate of Fonmon in the Vale of Glamorgan.34Glam. Archives, D/DF E/606; D/DF E/62. He made a temporary reappearance to militia and assessment commissions in March 1660. His political career came to an abrupt end at the restoration of the monarchy, however, and like others who had held office during the interregnum, he was subjected to low-level harassment by the new authorities. He complained in 1660 that goods of his had been confiscated on the spurious grounds that he was excepted from the act of oblivion, and in 1663 appeared twice before exchequer commissioners in Glamorgan, to account for revenues that had once passed through his hands. To add to the sense of oppression he must have felt, his widowed mother, monstered as ‘the father and mother of sedition’ was also made to account for herself, and some examinations of others, as well as members of the Price family, were held at Gellihir. Presumably on the basis of his inclusion among the commissioners for the security of the protector in 1656, which provided members of the high court of justice, Price was alleged to have sat in justice on the royalists John Gerard (1654) and Dr John Hewitt (1658). He is only likely to have been involved in the second of these state trials.35CSP Dom. 1660-1, 382; E113/2, answers of John Price, Elizabeth Price, Rowland Dawkins, John Price of Park; SP29/62, f. 99.

By 1657, Price’s first wife had died, and his second marriage brought him an estate in East Barnet, Hertfordshire, which enabled him to extricate himself from a Welsh context which was no longer politically congenial. His first three sons were not baptized until after the Restoration, while their infant successors were rushed to the font.36F.C. Cass, East Barnet, 143; Cass, Monken Hadley, 27. He retained his links with his former political associates, serving as a trustee of the will of Philip Jones in 1673.37PROB11/347 f. 198v.

As further proof that he was not a convinced Baptist, the Ilston church notwithstanding, his last known public office was as churchwarden of East Barnet, where he was buried on 7 July 1688. By his will, dated 3 July, he required his eldest son and heir John to pay his younger son Heneage, a London goldsmith, £1,500 with interest, to pay his three surviving daughters £300 each and £500 to his widow, and to pay his sons Ralph and Edward £200 each when their apprenticeship expired. John, whose elder half-brother William had died in 1683, acquired the ‘mansion house in Wales’, which had 15 hearths in 1670, and the estate there.38PROB11/392, f. 94v; Glam. Hearth Tax ed. Parkinson, 110.