Price’s grandfather was an unsuccessful candidate for Herefordshire in 1754. His father, a celebrated aesthete and champion of the picturesque landscape, was a lifelong Whig, but refused to be drawn into standing either for the county or for Hereford, thinking it ‘a great trouble, and no honour’. Price himself had no such reservations and from his youth moved in Whig political circles. He joined Brooks’s Club on 8 Feb. 1810 and Grillion’s in 1812. Among his best friends were John Nicholas Fazakerley and Lord Milton, to whose father Earl Fitzwilliam he recommended Fazakerley as a candidate for Lincoln in 1812. His own views were at first directed towards the city of Hereford, where he hoped that the retirement of the Whig sitting Members might enable him to come in unopposed with the ministerial candidate Cocks in 1818; but the Members stood their ground and in February 1818 he switched his ambition to the county. He had a competitor in Col. George Cornewall who hoped to replace the ailing Whig Member Foley rather than oppose the ministerial Member Cotterell, even if Price made way for him to do so.
Price did not sign the requisition to Tierney to lead the Whigs. His attachment was to Lord Milton, whom he had advised the year before against accepting the leadership, on account of the trouble that Henry Brougham and others of his ilk would cause him. When Milton’s health led to his planning a stay in Italy in September 1818, Price declined an invitation to join him as he was anxious not to miss Parliament.
On reform, he had informed Milton in April that in the case of Barnstaple he would prefer to extend the borough franchise to the adjacent hundred rather than add the freeholders of the hundred: moreover, he disliked the idea of disfranchising the borough in favour of another. On 22 June he was in the majority for the extension of the Penryn franchise. On 1 July he stated, on Burdett’s motion, that ‘although a friend to parliamentary reform, he was far from entertaining those wild notions which had thrown discredit on the subject’, but he was prepared to support this motion as unexceptionable. ‘It is a misfortune,’ he informed Milton, 25 Oct. 1819, ‘but I believe I am pretty nearly the only Whig in the county; this circumstance, together with the recollection that one of my very principal supporters is a government man, naturally makes me not very anxious for county meetings.’ On the recent occasion of a presentation to his predecessor Foley, Edward Bolton Clive had ‘proposed the abolition of the names of Tory and Whig, and the substitution of Reformer and No Reformer: which elicited from me a few words in defence of Whiggism’. He did not shirk a county meeting on Peterloo either and it went off ‘very harmoniously’.
Staying at Milton’s London house, Price voted steadily with opposition in the last session of his first Parliament and on 22 Dec. 1819, apropos of the newspaper stamp duties bill, said:
He must connect the present bill with the other measures which had been brought forward by ministers; and in his mind the system taken as a whole, created more grounds of alarm than the state of the country which it was intended to meet, alarming as that was.
He died 5 Nov. 1857.