MALORY (MALLORIE, MALLORYE), William (1577-1646), of Studley Royal, Ripon, Yorks.

Malory’s family had settled at Hutton Conyers in the North Riding by the 1340s, and having then acquired Studley, near Ripon, by marriage in the mid-fifteenth century, they had made it their principal residence.29VCH N. Riding, i. 403; Memorials Fountains Abbey ed. Walbran, 314-5; Vis. Yorks. ed. Foster, 156-7; T.S. Gowland, ‘The manor and liberties of Ripon’, YAJ xxxii. 65, 79. His grandfather, Sir William Mallory, had represented Yorkshire in the Parliament of 1584, and his father, Sir John Mallory, had sat for Thirsk in 1601 and Ripon in 1604. Although both Sir William and Sir John appear to have been good Protestants, they had numerous Catholic relations – including Sir John’s wife (Malory’s mother) – and the family’s legal and political adversaries continued to question its soundness in religion until well into the seventeenth century.30HP Commons 1558-1603, ‘Sir William Mallory’; HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Sir John Mallory’; ‘William Mallory’. Sig. SP23/106, p. 307; W. Yorks. Archives (Leeds), WYL150 (former Vyner mss 5899, 5902). During the 1625 election campaign, in which Malory (who signed his name thus) and his kinsman Sir Thomas (later 1st Baron) Fairfax† challenged Sir John Savile† and his son for the county seats, a godly curate in Savile’s employ spread allegations about Malory’s papist connections.31Fairfax Corresp. ed Johnson, i. 6-7; HP Commons 1604-29, ‘William Mallory’. Perhaps alarmed by these tactics, Malory decided to accept the offer of a seat at Ripon, leaving Fairfax and Sir Thomas Wentworth† (the future earl of Strafford) to take on and defeat the Saviles at the county election.32Bodl. Fairfax 34, f. 47: HP Commons 1604-29, ‘William Mallory’. There is insufficient evidence to support the assertion that Malory was a church papist.33C. Russell, Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford, 1990), 144. Nevertheless, his vulnerability to such insinuations would be revealed all too clearly in 1628, when his Catholic younger brother, Christopher, was arrested on suspicion of spying.34CSP Dom. 1628-9, pp. 255, 343; APC 1628-9, p. 309; Memorials Fountains Abbey ed. Walbran, 326.

Having failed to inherit his father’s place on the council of the north, Malory was freer to criticise the court and its allies, and in the 1620s Parliaments he was a vociferous spokesman for the liberties of the subject, parliamentary privilege and the redress of grievances. After the 1621 Parliament, in which he had been particularly outspoken, he was imprisoned in the Tower for six months for having ‘carried an higher hand against his majesty than ever any subject did in that place [the Commons]’. Re-elected for Ripon in 1624 and 1625, he continued to cause trouble for the government, supporting Sir Robert Phelips and other ‘country’ leaders in their attempts to obstruct or amend royal policy. At the 1626 election, in which he surrendered his place at Ripon to his brother-in-law, he backed Wentworth and Henry Belasyse* for the county seats against the Saviles, although he was never part of Wentworth’s faction in Yorkshire. Less prominent in the 1628 Parliament, he nevertheless remained a critic of government policy, and in October 1629 he and Phelips petitioned (unsuccessfully) for the release of the Members imprisoned for manhandling the Speaker at the end of the second session.35APC 1621-3, pp. 112, 119, 308; HP Commons 1604-29, ‘William Mallory’; C. Russell, ‘The examination of Mr. Mallory after the Parliament of 1621’, BIHR l. 125-32.

Despite his truculent behaviour at Westminster, Malory was sufficiently trusted by the crown to be in the running for a deputy lieutenancy (in 1623), and by the mid-1630s he had been appointment colonel of foot in the Yorkshire trained bands.36SP14/151/69, f. 91; Add. 28082, f. 80. Appointed a Forced Loan commissioner in 1627, he apparently served dutifully in that capacity, despite widespread doubts as to the loan’s legality.37C193/12/2, ff. 15v, 17; Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P12(a); CSP Dom. 1627-8, p. 194. And in the early 1630s, he paid a heavy fine of £50 to the knighthood commissioners apparently without demur.38‘Compositions for not taking knighthood’ ed. Baildon, 98. However, he did relatively little work on the West or North Riding benches during the 1630s, and even allowing for the fact that there were no Parliaments in this period, and therefore little opportunity to be politically active, Malory seems to have led a life of quiet retirement for most of the decade.39N. Riding Quarter Sessions Recs. ed. J.C. Atkinson (N. Riding Rec. Soc. iv), 186. His social circle in Yorkshire was eclectic, for it included his Catholic kinsmen the Eures, the future royalist Brian Palmes* (whose sister had married Malory’s eldest son William) and his godly second cousin Sir Ferdinando (later 2nd Baron) Fairfax*, the future parliamentarian general.40C54/3126/27; C54/3263/14; W. Yorks. Archives (Leeds), WYL150 (former Vyner mss 5633, 5902; parcel 444); Yorks. Stuart Fines ed. Brigg, 109, 129, 223; CCC 1986.

It was only with the approach of war against the Scottish Covenanters in the late 1630s that Malory openly began to question the wisdom of royal policy – that is, insofar as it applied to Yorkshire. In January 1639, following a royal order that the county’s trained bands muster for possible deployment against the Scots, Malory signed a petition to the king from the Yorkshire deputy lieutenants and militia commanders, expressing their readiness to march to any rendezvous, but reminding Charles that their troops were ‘never...once employed out of our county upon any remote service whatsoever’.41SP16/409/53, f. 141; SP16/409/67, f. 167; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, i. 353-4. He signed another petition to the king from the county’s deputy lieutenants in March, in which the petitioners asked that their men be paid a month in advance before marching to any rendezvous.42SP16/414/92, f. 217; SP16/414/93, f. 219. Despite Malory’s concerns at the local impact of Charles’s Scottish policy, he and Sir Ferdinando Fairfax were at Knaresborough by May 1639, marshalling their regiments for the march northwards.43Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, i. 365, 371. And in the second bishops’ war a year later, Malory’s was one of four Yorkshire militia regiments selected to defend Newcastle – although this order was later rescinded for lack of money.44E351/293.

In the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, Malory was again returned for Ripon.45C219/42/2/94. He received only one appointment in the House, to the committee of privileges (16 Apr.) and, in contrast to his performances in the Parliaments of the 1620s, appears to have said very little in debate.46CJ ii. 4a. His only recorded speech was on 23 April, during a debate on grievances and supply, when he declared the House’s readiness to vote Charles subsidies if Ship Money was removed.47Aston’s Diary, 39. That summer, Malory again registered his local opposition to royal impositions, joining Fairfax and other ‘disaffected’ Yorkshire gentry in a petition to the king late in July, complaining about the military burdens upon the the county. The petition was denounced by Strafford as ‘mutinous’.48Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 1215; D. Scott, ‘‘Hannibal at our gates’: loyalists and fifth-columnists during the bishops’ wars – the case of Yorkshire’, HR lxx. 275. However, he neglected to sign the Yorkshire gentry’s second such petition, in August. And following the Scots’ victory at Newburn on 28 August, he and other loyalist gentlemen were appointed by Strafford and the king to a commission of array for Yorkshire, as part of a last, desperate attempt to mobilise the county’s trained bands against the Covenanters.49Add. 28088, f. 94. With the second bishops’ war clearly lost by mid-September, Malory signed the third Yorkshire petition, which repeated the demand made by a group of dissident English peers that Charles should summon a new Parliament.50Cumb. RO (Kendal), Strickland Ms vol. 1608-1700, N38 Car. I. Yet in September and October, Malory defied the wishes of the majority of the petitioners as one of a dozen or so Yorkshire deputy lieutenants and militia officers to sign warrants for levying an additional month’s pay for the regiments of the future royalists Sir Thomas Danbie* and Sir William Pennyman*, which had been assigned, on the king’s orders, to defend the county’s northern border against incursions by the Scots.51N. Yorks. RO, ZFW, Wyvill of Constable Burton mss, Wyvill fam. pprs. to 1700 (mic. 1761); Scott, ‘Hannibal’, 288. Almost every member of this group was to side with the king in 1642, although it was probably hostility to the Scots which served to unite them in 1640.

Malory was returned to the Long Parliament for Ripon with his son (Sir) John Mallory on 9 October 1640, in what was to prove a brief and rather anticlimactic epilogue to his often turbulent parliamentary career.52C219/43/3/120. He received only 20 committee appointments before the outbreak of the civil war – all but one of them before the autumn 1641 recess – and participated very little in debate.53CJ ii. 20b, 42a, 48b, 49b, 53b, 59b, 60a, 75a, 77b, 79b, 83a, 84b, 109b, 129b, 136b, 152a, 164a, 172b, 197b, 414b. Certainly as a critic of crown policy and advocate of reform, he was not nearly the force he had been in the Parliaments of the early 1620s. In fact, his only notable contribution to the House’s proceedings before the spring of 1641 was to question a decision to allow Lord Keeper Finch (John Finch†), who was under threat of impeachment, to put his case to the House (21 Dec. 1640). Malory moved, successfully, that ‘this favour of his being heard, be no precedent to any other. If any desire it ... [they] may be heard at committee, not in [the] House’.54Northcote Note Bk. 94-5. His status as a veteran of many previous parliamentary campaigns for the redress of grievances and the reform of ‘abuses’ accounted for several of his committee appointments. Thus he was named to committees for examining the crown’s perceived breaches of parliamentary privilege in the Short Parliament and the Parliament of 1628-9 (18 Dec.); on a bill for holding annual Parliaments (30 Dec.); and for regulating the clerk of the market (the crown purveyor), whose supposedly arbitrary proceedings he had often singled out for attack in the 1620s Parliaments (29 Jan. 1641).55CJ ii. 53b, 60a, 75a. And on 20 March, he was added to the committee for drawing up charges against the judges, which was to consider the judgement given in the court of exchequer concerning knighthood fines.56CJ ii. 109b. The extirpation of Laudian innovations was not, it seems, high on his agenda at Westminster, for he was named to only one committee that related directly to religious reform – that set up on 13 February for abolishing superstition and idolatry and for the advancement of true worship.57CJ ii. 84b.

Despite being added to the committee for the impeachment of Strafford (5 Feb. 1641), Malory was among the Yorkshire gentlemen whom the earl called as witnesses at his trial – although in the event he does not appear to have testified.58CJ ii. 79b; Procs. LP iii. 362, 363. The ‘Mr Mallory’ who voted on 21 April against the earl’s attainder was almost certainly William rather than his son John. One contemporary list of the Straffordians named William specifically; moreover, it seems that John rarely attended the House.59Supra, ‘John Mallory’; Procs. LP iv. 42, 51. Malory’s son-in-law Richard Aldburghe was also among the seven Yorkshire Straffordians. Malory’s emergence as a Straffordian did not preclude his taking the Protestation on 3 May, or his nomination to a committee set up on 6 May to secure the kingdom and English liberties in the aftermath of the ‘Tower plot’ – a conspiracy to spring the earl from the Tower and spirit him away by ship.60CJ ii. 133a, 136b.

Malory’s priority at Westminster, certainly by the spring of 1641, was to secure relief for the northern counties, where the English and Scottish armies had been quartered since the summer of 1640. On 3 March, he referred to the ‘miseries and calamities of the northern parts’ and requested ‘that some instant course might be taken to send money thither, especially into Yorkshire, where the king’s army lay’. Lord Fairfax took up his refrain, but the House quickly moved on to other matters.61Proc. LP ii. 613, 614. After a petition from Yorkshire relating the ‘miserable estate of those parts’ was read on 23 March, Malory renewed his call for a debate on the matter, claiming that conditions in the region were such that ‘they [the people of Yorkshire] could neither sow their summer corn nor hope to enjoy their winter corn or grass’. But although he was supported by ‘divers northern men’, the House proceeded instead with the order of the day – a debate on church reform.62Proc. LP iii. 85, 88. He was an active member of the committee of both Houses that disbursed subsidy money during the spring of 1641 for the relief of the northern counties.63SP28/1C, ff. 26, 32. And on 20 May and 10 June, he was named to committees to consider how best to disband the English and Scottish armies.64CJ ii. 152a, 172b. Granted leave on 31 July, he was required, on returning to Yorkshire, to send John Mallory back to the House, whom the Commons had dispatched into the north to investigate the army plot.65CJ ii. 138, 231b.

Having been keen in previous Parliaments to uphold the liberties of the subject, Malory would almost certainly have been opposed to the militia bill that Sir Arthur Hesilrige introduced on 7 December 1641. One of the Mallorys, either William or John, certainly declaimed against the bill, urging that it be burnt in Westminster [Old] Palace Yard and demanding that Hesilrige be made to answer for his presumption. The fact that William Strode I spoke in mitigation of ‘Mr. Mallory’s speech’ may be evidence that the speaker had been William Malory. Strode, like Malory, was a veteran of the 1620s Parliaments. However, John Mallory was apparently the more hotheaded of the two men, and his outspokenness on this occasion would perhaps help to explain his knighthood on 23 December.66Supra, ‘John Mallory’; D’Ewes (C), 246-7.

Malory is known to have attended the House on only one occasion in 1642 – on 5 February, when he spoke during the second reading of a bill against wine monopolists and was added to the committee for customers (to which the said bill was referred).67CJ ii. 414b; PJ i. 280. At some point soon afterwards, he abandoned Parliament, and by the end of March there was a growing suspicion at Westminster that he had joined the king at York.68HMC Cowper, ii. 311; HMC Buccleuch, i. 295. On 29 March, the House resolved that Malory and three other Yorkshire royalists – Sir William Pennyman, Sir Thomas Danbie and Sir William Savile* – should be summoned to attend the service of the House.69CJ ii. 503a, 515a. In June, he was named to the Yorkshire commission of array; and in August, he signed a petition to Parliament from the county’s royalists, protesting at the proceedings of Sir John Hotham* as parliamentary governor of Hull.70Northants. RO, FH133; LJ v. 273b-274a. On 6 September, the Commons disabled him from sitting for neglecting the service of the House and for signing the August petition.71CJ ii. 754b. Sir John Mallory would be disabled early in 1643 for ‘appearing in arms against the Parliament’.72CJ ii. 929a.

What moved Malory to turn away from Parliament in 1642 is not clear. But it is worth noting that although he had regularly opposed crown policy under both James I and Charles I, the one contentious issue between king and Parliament on which he had remained silent was the supposed threat to ‘true religion’ from Arminianism. His apparent unwillingness to see the perceived distempers in the English body politic as the product of some deep-rooted popish conspiracy against Protestantism may partly explain why he sided with the king during the civil war.

Over 60 years old at the outbreak of civil war, Malory left the fighting to his son, whom Henry Clifford†, 5th earl of Cumberland appointed governor of the royalist garrison at Skipton Castle in January 1643. The Mallorys were close friends of the Clifford family, and the earl spent some of the autumn of 1643 as a guest at Studley Hall.73R.T. Spence, Skipton Castle in the Great Civil War (Skipton, 1991), 23, 45. Like Cumberland, Malory signed the so-called Yorkshire ‘engagement’ in February 1643, by which the signatories pledged their estates as security on loans for the maintenance of the earl of Newcastle’s royalist army.74CCAM 908. Malory heeded the king’s summons to attend the Oxford Parliament, and he signed its letter of 27 January 1644 to the earl of Essex, urging him to compose a peace.75Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 574. It was this act which prompted Marchamont Nedham, the editor of Mercurius Britannicus, to dismiss him as

an old cobweb that used always to hang in former Parliaments, till he was swept out of this. He is one that knows no more than what belongs to the state of this kingdom than his fallow dog, or Ringwood his hound, for he never followed other design than hawking and hunting in his life; and Jack his son is just such another, and both [are] of their great-grandfather’s religion – Henry the Eights [sic] Protestants.76Mercurius Britanicus no. 22 (5-12 Feb. 1644), 175 (E.32.18).

Despite taking the king’s side during the war, Malory appears to have remained on good terms with the Fairfaxes of Denton. When an assessment rating dispute flared up in Yorkshire in mid-1645, Lord Fairfax’s brother Charles Fairfax suggested enlisting the help of ‘cousin Malory’ in vindicating the rights of the West Riding.77Fairfax Corresp. ed Bell, iii. 243.

Malory petitioned to compound in November 1645, claiming that he had never borne arms for the king, ‘but peaceably lived within the Parliament’s quarters the most of this two years at his house at Studley, where he now is very weak with a long sickness’.78SP23/106, p. 307. The Committee for Compounding allowed Malory’s petition, but had not completed composition proceedings before his death on 13 March 1646. He was buried the next day (14 Mar.) in Ripon Minster.79SP23/193, p. 624; Ripon Minster reg. In his will – in which he expressed assurance ‘of a glorious resurrection ... amongst the elect people of God’ – he claimed that his debts of more than £500 exceeded the value of his personal estate, ‘which of late times has been much impaired’. To satisfy his creditors, he ordered the sale of his lands around Galphay, which lay about four miles from Ripon. Most of his property, however, was already ‘settled and estated’ on Sir John Mallory.80Borthwick, Prob. Reg. 48, f. 161. With Sir John’s death in 1656, and that of his only son William in 1667, the Mallory family became extinct in the male line.