During Elizabeth’s reign Mallory was overshadowed by his father. Almost the only information found about his activities between his marriage and his return for Thirsk concerns the contested county election of 1597, when he supported Sir John Stanhope and Sir Thomas Posthumous Hoby, presumably leading the Mallory freeholders as heir of his father, who did not attend. He seems in his youth to have been a client of the Cecils: writing to Sir Robert in May 1603, complaining of rumours that Cecil was ‘hardly conceited’ against him, and insisting that he had ‘more relied of your house than of any other of the nobility whomsoever’.3A. Gooder, Parl. Rep. Yorks. ii. (Yorks. Arch. Soc. rec. ser. xcvi), 124; HMC Hatfield, xv. 82.
The chief Mallory estate was only some 12 miles from Thirsk, and the family had considerable local influence, but Mallory may have owed his parliamentary election to the lord of the manor of Thirsk, the 6th Earl of Derby, whose ‘high steward’ he claimed to be in the course of the continuation of a quarrel which broke out at the end of Elizabeth’s reign between the elder Mallory and Sir Stephen Proctor, a new justice of the peace in Yorkshire.
On his father’s death Mallory continued the dispute, complaining to the Earl of Salisbury in October 1605 about ‘divers unkindnesses’ between Proctor and others over Derby’s property. Four years later the controversy was still not settled. Proctor, who claimed to have been appointed steward of Thirsk by Salisbury and Lady Derby, accused Mallory of attending the open fair in the town accompanied by 40 or 50 men, and turning out Proctor’s deputy.4HMC Hatfield, xii. 161; xvii. 445; CSP Dom. 1603-10, pp. 494, 539; Reid, loc. cit.
Mallory died in 1619.5C142/708/102.