PRISE, Herbert (c.1605-78), of The Priory, Brecon.

Herbert Prise entered the Middle Temple in 1622, at the age of 17, but instead of pursuing a legal career he seems to have gone to the continent, where he allegedly served as ‘a lieutenant in the Low Provinces’.20L. Inn Admiss. i. 113; Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, ii. 342-3. He was appointed a member of the queen’s household in 1632, but in April 1633 was in trouble for duelling with a royal page over ‘a young lady’ – a fight that was said to have left Prise ‘hurt in three places’ while ‘the other is come off untouched’.21Add. 29974, f. 214; Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton ii. 342-3. Court-watchers were in no doubt that the king ‘is herewith highly offended … and it is doubted they will at least lose their places’.22Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton ii. 342-3. Prise was sent to France to cool off, being recalled in January 1634 after the intervention of Henry Jermyn*.23Strafforde Letters i. 175. He had regained royal favour by 1638, when he was allowed to marry one of the queen’s maids of honour, ‘whom the King gave in marriage’.24CSP Dom. 1638-9, p. 103. In the spring of 1639, at the outset of the first bishops’ war, Prise had ‘the good or ill fortune to kill the first Scot’ in a skirmish on the border, but instead of receiving praise he found himself ‘much blamed for keeping his men in no better order’.25CSP Dom. 1639, pp. 201, 207; Add. 29974, f. 328. In September 1639 the king proposed to give him the immensely lucrative post of collector of customs for the port of London for life, but although the grant was drafted it was never implemented.26CSP Dom. 1639, p. 528. Prise was returned for Brecon to the Short Parliament, in which he made no mark unless he, not Charles, was the ‘Mr Price’ who on 2 May 1640 suggested that the House should present the king with a petition of grievances together with the bill of supply.27Procs. Short Parl., 188.

In the Long Parliament elections Prise was involved in a double return at Brecon, and it was only on 6 January 1641 that the House eventually gave him leave to sit in preference to his rival, Robert Williams.28CJ ii. 63b; D’Ewes (N), 223. He took no part in initiatives by opponents of the crown to dismantle the Caroline church and state, and his only recorded appointment in the early months of the session was to a committee of 17 February to review the king’s property grants to the queen.29CJ ii. 87b. On 2 April he was included in the Commons’ deputation required to attend the trial of the 1st earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†), but this did not imply his approval of the prosecution.30CJ ii. 115b; Procs. LP iii. 315. Indeed, on 21 April Prise almost certainly voted against the attainder. (Rushworth lists both Charles Price and Herbert Prise, while Verney includes Charles Price and one ‘Mr Pirce’, presumably a mistake for this MP.)31Procs. LP iv. 42; Verney, Mems., 58; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 249. Prise joined the vast majority of MPs in taking the Protestation on 3 May, but it soon emerged that he did not share their alarm at news of the army plot.32CJ ii. 133b.

Prise’s support for the king would become increasingly apparent during the summer of 1641. On 8 June, he interrupted the House as it prepared to condemn George Lord Digby* for his remarks about the army plotter, George Goring*. When the serjeant-at-arms brought in candles to allow the vote to proceed, Prise and Sir William Widdrington seized them from him and forced a chaotic adjournment.33Procs. LP v. 61, 61n. The House had not in fact authorised such illuminations, the sense of it being for adjournment, but the next day Prise was called to account for his part in the disorderly scene. According to D’Ewes, Prise

stood up and in his place [and] confessed that he had not been long a Parliament man and therefore he might be ignorant of the orders of the House, and therefore desired the pardon thereof if he had transgressed. That his intention was only to advance the service of the House in what he did, for, many desiring to have the question put touching the Lord Digby, and it growing late and candles being called for and brought in, when he perceived that they were likely to be carried out again he stepped out of his place to the serjeant and took one of the candles from him and set it down on the House floor that it might have been of use to all.34Procs. LP v. 64

He then withdrew, and the case was debated. In the subsequent division, the House voted in favour of sending Prise and Widdrington to the Tower by 189 to 172, with Sir John Clotworthy and Denzil Holles tellers for the yeas and Sir John Strangways and Sir John Culpeper for the noes.35CJ ii. 171b; Procs. LP v. 65-6. The pair languished in the Tower until 14 June when, according to the Journal, their humble petition for released was accepted by the House.36CJ ii. 173b, 175a. Sir Simonds D’Ewes*, by contrast, recorded that the petition ‘was for the present rejected and they left still in custody’.37Two Diaries of Long Parl., 122, 140n; Procs. LP v. 130. When Prise re-appeared in the Commons at the end of the month, he was unrepentant. On 26 July he defended Goring and his old friend, Henry Jermyn*, against allegations of their involvement in the army plot, supporting Goring’s statement that ‘he offered the disparate motions to the other party only to divert, but both of them did disagree to it’.38Procs. LP vi. 96. On 12 August, Prise joined Culpeper in opposing the prosecution of another suspect, Henry Percy*, arguing that the fresh evidence against him had come after the agreed time limit.39Procs. LP vi. 387.

Nothing of known of Prise’s activities from August until December 1641, and thereafter his involvement in Parliament is obscured by the clerk’s routine failure to distinguish between him and Charles Price. He may have been one of the emissaries to the king to express ‘the grounds of their fears’ on 31 December, after several days of mob violence in and around Westminster.40CJ ii. 365a; D’Ewes (C), 374. He may also have been the ‘Mr Price’ who was teller with another supporter of the king, Edward Kyrton, against the sitting of a committee of the House at the Guildhall to vindicate the privileges of Parliament in the wake of the king’s bid to arrest five of its Members on 5 January 1642.41CJ ii. 368b; PJ i. 15. Despite his opposition to the move, he was nevertheless named to that committee on the same day, and he was confirmed as a member when it subsequently transferred to Grocers’ Hall on 17 January.42CJ ii. 369a, 385a. It was probably Prise who joined Culpeper as teller for the noes on a motion to bring charges against James Stuart, 1st duke of Richmond, on 27 January - a motion carried with a substantial majority.43PJ i. 191, 198. By the late spring, Prise’s opposition to the king’s enemies was well known. When another courtier, Daniel O’Neill, escaped from the Tower in May, MPs suspected that Prise and his servant were among those who ‘did help him away’, as they had visited O’Neill shortly before.44PJ ii. 283, 286-7. Prise was summoned to the Commons to explain himself on 6 May, but chose not to attend, and on the call of the House on 16 June he was one of the 45 Members listed absent.45CJ ii. 561b, 626a.

At the beginning of the civil war Prise returned to Breconshire, and raised troops for the king’s army. His regiment had reached Oxford by 1 November 1642, and served with the main field army before returning to the Welsh marches in the early months of 1643.46Newman, Royalist Officers, 305; Hutton, Royalist War Effort, 57; Royalist Ordnance Pprs. (Oxf. Rec. Soc. xliii, xlix), 158. Prise was the acting governor of Hereford when the city capitulated to Sir William Waller* on 25 April 1643 and on 8 May he was disabled from sitting in the House ‘for bearing arms, and being in actual war, against the Parliament’.47Newman, Royalist Officers, 305; Royalist Ordnance Pprs., 460; Phillips, Civil War in Wales i. 152; ii. 69; CJ iii. 75b. In the new year of 1644 he attended the royalist Parliament at Oxford, and was one of the signatories of the letter of 27 January to the 3rd earl of Essex.48Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 574. Shortly afterwards he was back in Wales, where he took charge of Brecon with ‘not above 200 foot, and not 150 horse’, and began measures to recruit troops and raise money for the king.49Add. 18981, ff. 145, 149. He also worked with John Vaughan I* in a vain attempt to prevent the parliamentarians in Pembrokeshire from extending their influence into Cardiganshire and Carmarthenshire.50Phillips, Civil War in Wales ii. 156-7.

These activities were interrupted in April, when orders arrived for the Brecon garrison to join Prince Rupert at Hereford. Prise initially objected to this new plan

I am confident if your highness had understood the condition of these countries and of how great advantage my prosecuting of your highness’s first commands towards Pembrokeshire would have been to his majesty’s service, and how small an addition they [his forces] will be to the defence of Herefordshire, your highness would have been pleased to have spared this order.51Add. 18981, f. 149.

In May he was made governor of Brecon, holding this post until August 1645 when his regiment was re-incorporated into what remained of the king’s field army when it marched north towards Chester.52Symonds, Diary, 242; Hutton, Royalist War Effort, 140, 185. Prise was not at Brecon when it was taken by parliamentarian forces in November, and he may have already retreated to Hereford. When Hereford fell to Parliament on 18 December, he was again taken prisoner.53Phillips, Civil War in Wales i. 338, 343; ii. 286; Mems. of Prince Rupert iii. 120. On his release, Prise went into exile on the continent. In August 1646, when his wife compounded for her quarter portion of her family estate in the midlands, he was described as residing ‘beyond seas’.54CCC 1203. In February 1649 Prise’s delinquency was confirmed by the act for sequestration and composition in south Wales. His Welsh estate, estimated at £300 p.a., was placed under sequestration as late as 13 May 1651 after evasive action by his friends, led by Sir William Lewis*, who had let the property to a reliable tenant for £50 p.a. payable to Prise’s wife.55CCC 443; Fairfax Corresp. iv. 379-80; Phillips, Civil War in Wales i. 385. In November 1652 his name was inserted in the third act of sale of forfeit lands, to the great indignation of his wife, and by 1654 the properties had been sold.56CJ vii. 208a; CCC 1204, 2042-3.

Prise remained in exile on the continent for more than a decade. Some opinions ‘brought by Col. Price to Beauvais’ in March 1650 survive as evidence of his hopes for the revival of royalist fortunes in the months after the regicide.57CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 69-70. In 1653-4 he was at Regensburg (Ratisbon) with his friend Henry Wilmot*, 1st earl of Rochester, who was promoting the Stuart cause at the imperial diet.58CCSP ii. 168-343. On 7 June 1654 he wrote from Frankfurt that if his correspondence fell into Cromwellian hands, his wife and children at home would suffer, and a friend who had already been imprisoned for six months for corresponding with him would be ruined.59CCSP ii. 366. A better cipher was duly supplied by Sir Edward Hyde*, despite his low opinion of Prise, whom he thought ‘a man … that affected to know, or to be thought to know, the greatest secrets’, whose ‘presumption and importunity were always inconvenient’.60Clarendon, Hist. v. 386-8. Even with better security, a considerable amount of intelligence concerning Prise’s activities continued to fall into the hands of John Thurloe* in the mid- to late 1650s.61TSP ii. 373, 569, 614; iv. 10, 101, 233; v. 84; vii. 33-4. Cromwell's death in 1658 raised Prise’s hopes, and he became an active agent, making lengthy visits to England.62CCSP iv. 111, 166, 237, 247, 337, 382, 407, 414.

Despite the misgivings of Hyde and others, Prise was a close friend of the exiled king. In 1655 he had been promised the mastership of the household if a restoration took place, and he was made a clandestine baronet in 1657.63Nicholas Pprs. ii. 157. In 1660 he achieved both these honours, as well as regaining his old seat in elections for the Cavalier Parliament in 1661; but in other respects the Restoration proved a mere variation on the financial insecurity that had dogged him for years. His wife, overwhelmed with debts in 1662, complained of the inadequacy of the household income, which was mostly based on the arrears of a pension of £400 granted by the late king, and another annuity worth £40 which her husband had bought out of the exchequer.64CSP Dom. 1661-2, pp. 459, 473, 627. Her husband’s petitions to the king were no less plaintive, but appear to have fallen on deaf ears.65CSP Dom. 1665-6, p. 109; 1666-7, p. 254. Prise continued to serve as an MP, and as a supporter of the court interest, until his death on 14 January 1678. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.66HP Commons 1660-90, ‘Sir Herbert Price’.