Pryse, whose family had represented Cardiganshire since the seventeenth century, was successful at the general election of 1715, but was expelled next year for refusing to take the oaths.
the greatest incendiaries and most disaffected persons in the principality of Wales [and] ... the managers of the correspondence between the malcontents in North and South Wales [whose agents] so terrified the people in general, that neither the commissions issued out by me, nor even the orders of the Privy Council, could either in the time of the rebellion or since be put into execution, and had I gone down without the grant of some regular forces I had nothing to expect but to have been murdered.
4 Jan. 1717, SP Dom. 35/8, f. 68.
In 1717 at the time of the new Jacobite plot (see Caesar, Charles) Lord Mar, the Pretender’s secretary of state, wrote to Pryse, 7 Apr., asking him and his friends to prepare for a landing of the Duke of Ormonde in the west country.