PRICE, William (1619-91), of Rhiwlas, Llanfor, Merion.

The family at Rhiwlas owed their prominence to Rhys ap Maredudd, ‘Rhys Mawr’, a follower of Henry Tudor at Bosworth. His son was a chaplain to Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, and benefited materially from the dissolution of the monasteries. The first at Rhiwlas to use the settled surname Price was Cadwaladr Wyn (d. 1593), son of John Wyn ap Cadwaladr, knight of the shire for Merioneth in 1559. As Cadwaladr Price he served as knight in the Parliament of 1584.20DWB, ‘Price (family), Rhiwlas’; HP Commons 1558-1603. William Price was Cadwaladr’s great-grandson. Price’s father died when he was around ten years old. Any disaster that might have befallen the family at this point was doubtless prevented by the survival until 1640 of his grandfather, Sir William Jones†, serjeant-at-law, MP for Caernarvonshire and Beaumaris in four Parliaments between 1597 and 1614 and a powerful figure in the Llŷn peninsula. Price himself attended his grandfather’s inn of court, Lincoln’s, but did not pursue his legal studies, probably because of the extent of his inheritance, which included not only Rhiwlas, but also Faenol Fawr, Bodelwyddan, Denbighshire.21DWB. His election for Merioneth to the Long Parliament soon after he reached majority age was thus a recognition of the family’s seniority in the county’s parliamentary politics.

When Price reached reached Westminster, he appears to have taken virtually no role in the affairs of the House. He sat on no committees, and the only occasion when the clerk recorded his presence was on 3 May 1641, when he took the Protestation.22CJ ii. 133a. At the end of that month it was reported that Price had spoken nothing in the House worth recording.23Cal. Wynn Pprs. 272. Some of this reluctance may have been rooted in a lack of sympathy with the dominant climate of reform in Parliament, but there were family preoccupations also. In December negotiations between Price and the family of Mary Holland were in progress, in one report ‘not … by them desired’, and in the middle of the month took place the funeral of Price’s formidable grandfather, Sir William Jones.24Salusbury Corresp. 112, 113-4. However, it is clear that Price was from the outset an enthusiastic supporter of the royalist cause during the civil war. He was named a commissioner of array for Merioneth on 10 August 1642. The statement that Price left Westminster to be with the king on 11 November at Hounslow Heath before the taking of Brentford the following day appears to rest on the naming on 28 November of a ‘Mr Price’ and four others in the Journal of the House. This Price is named fourth in a list of individuals who were not Members, and no expulsion or other disciplinary action followed, so it seems unlikely that this was in fact William Price.25CJ ii. 866b-867a; Tucker, ‘Colonel William Price’, 2-3. We are on surer ground in asserting that Price raised a regiment in Merioneth at his own expense, as his own epitaph in St Asaph records. The epitaph credits him with first having recruited soldiers in ‘1641’, and even if this is taken to mean the first three months of 1642 it still pre-dates his nomination as a commissioner of array, and significantly earlier than general mobilization for civil war. Unless it is a simple error, therefore, it may be a reference to a militia command he held in Merioneth.26Tucker, ‘Colonel William Price’, 7.

By November 1643 Price had joined his regiment with those of others in Merioneth and was based at Rhug, near Corwen. He joined his fellow commanders in an appeal to the Merioneth gentry to resist the advancing incursion of Sir Thomas Myddelton* and Sir William Brereton*.27NLW, Clenennau 538. He lived during this period at Faenol Fawr, his grandmother's Denbighshire home, and at Kinmel, his wife’s property.28Symonds, Diary, 260. He served with his men in north-east Wales until the royalists were defeated. His efforts to march men and to transport his own possessions and the materiel of war between Denbighshire and Merioneth were disrupted more than once in 1645 by parliamentarian soldiers, and on one occasion he was betrayed by a servant who allowed his enemies to have ‘rich prey of clothes and money’ at Price’s expense.29Cambrian Quarterly Magazine, i. 64; Phillips, Civil War in Wales, i. 342-3; Brereton Letter-Bks. i. 289. His early enthusiasm for the king’s cause may have owed not a little to his allegiance to the episcopal church. Faenol Fawr, his Denbighshire residence, had been built by his great-grandfather, John Lloyd, registrar of St Asaph cathedral, and Price himself may have been a bailiff or collector of St Asaph tithes.30Cal. Wynn Pprs. 291. In January 1644 he broke off from his military duties to attend the Oxford Parliament, and signed the letter to the parliamentarian lord general, the 3rd earl of Essex (Robert Devereux), that embodied peace overtures.31The Names of the Lords and Commons (1646), 3; The Declaration of the Lords and Commons (Oxford, 1644), 22. This led directly to his being identified at Westminster as among those ‘deserting the service of the House, and being in the king’s quarters, and adhering to that party’. He was disabled from sitting any further in the Parliament (5 Feb. 1644).32CJ iii. 398b. Price had surrendered by May 1646, when he was identified as one who had been in arms against Parliament.33Cal Wynn Pprs. 291. He seems subsequently to have abandoned military activity and active politics, and there is no record of his having involved himself in the second civil war of 1648. He was somehow able to present himself in June 1649 as one who had not already been subject to the attention of the parliamentary agencies of penal taxation. He begged to compound voluntarily, claiming brazenly that he had never taken arms against Parliament, and was fined £200.34CCC 2090. His own epitaph recorded how he had ‘suffered grievously’ for his adherence to the king’s cause, but he avoided sequestration. It has been plausibly claimed that he owed his lenient treatment by Parliament to the influence of his brother-in-law, Col. John Carter*, who in 1647 had married his wife’s sister, and who from 1646 was governor of Conwy for Parliament.35Tucker, ‘Colonel William Price’, 7; Bangor Univ. Library, Kinmel mss 697; DWB.

Price remained inactive politically through the interregnum. In January 1654 he wrote to Richard Wynn* of Gwydir to thank him for returning to him books from his own library, which had evidently been dispersed around the district during the upheavals of civil war. Price complained of ‘a distempered and bedlam time, if ever any were’, and he seems to have remained aloof from royalist plotting.36NLW, Wynn (Gwydir) mss, 2034. At the restoration of the monarchy, he quickly recovered his local offices, and was advanced to become a deputy lieutenant. He was among seven Merioneth men included in the king’s abortive order of the royal oak, for which his estate was assessed at £1,500.37Burke Commoners, 694. He seems not to have aspired to a parliamentary seat in the early years of the Restoration, but in March 1673 he was selected by the Merioneth gentry to succeed Henry Wynn* as knight of the shire for Merioneth. He sat as a government placeman, sending back news to the Wynn Family on politics and happenings at court. As in the Long Parliament, his profile in the Cavalier Parliament was low.38Cal. Wynn Pprs. 410-11; HP Commons 1660-1690. His habit in London was ‘rising very early, he goes to the chapel walks and sleeps in St James’s park, and in the evening takes a dose of good claret and so closes the day’.39Cal. Wynn Pprs. 410. By the time he was elected to Parliament for the second time, he had begun to harass Quakers on his estate in Merioneth.40J. G. Williams, ‘Quakers of Merioneth during the Seventeenth Century’, Jnl. Merion. Hist. Soc. viii. 143-4. In the summer of 1684 the duke of Beaufort (Henry Somerset*) was entertained by Price at Rhiwlas during the duke’s progress through Wales in his capacity as president of the council of the marches.41Tucker, ‘Colonel William Price’, 6. Price died on 31 October 1691, and was buried in St Asaph cathedral, where a monument records his loyalty to Charles I. A descendant at Rhiwlas was Richard Price, who sat for Beaumaris as a tory from 1754.42HP Commons 1754-1790.