[1] Although his family had lived in Sussex since the 15th century, Anthony Stapley was the first to play a significant role in national politics.

A minor when his father died in 1606, he was placed in the legal care his Protestant kinsman Sir Thomas Pelham, rather than his mothers' Catholic family.

[3] Stapley appears to have entered Christ's College, Cambridge around 1606,[4][1] then in 1609 moved to London where he studied law at Gray's Inn.

[1] In January 1640 Stapley, then a justice of the peace, was reported to Dr. William Bray, Archbishop Laud's chaplain, as causing trouble to the churches by his puritan leanings.

On the outbreak of the English Civil War he received a colonel's commission in the parliamentary army, and was present at the siege of Chichester in December 1642 under Sir William Waller.

At the Restoration he was one of the regicides notified as dead, and excepted from the act of Pardon and Oblivion of 6 June 1660 (which meant that his estate was subject to confiscation).