He was the eldest son of Sir Roger Copley by his wife Elizabeth, daughter of Sir William Shelley of Michelgrove, judge of the common pleas, and was one of the coheirs of Thomas Hoo, Baron Hoo and Hastings, whose title he claimed and sometimes assumed.
Lord Hoo's daughter Jane married his great-grandfather, Sir Roger Copley.
[1] According to Robert Parsons, in Relation of a Trial between the Bishop of Evreux and the Lord Plessis Mornay (1604), falsehoods he found in John Jewel's Apology (1562) led to Copley's conversion to Roman Catholicism.
After suffering imprisonment as a recusant, he left England without license in or about 1570, and spent the rest of his life in France, Spain, and the Low Countries.
He was in constant correspondence with William Cecil and other ministers, and sometimes with the queen herself, desiring pardon and permission to return to England and to enjoy his estates; but at the same time he was acting as the leader of the English expatriate Catholics, and sometimes was in the service of the king of Spain, from whom he had a pension, and by whom he was created baron of Gatton and grand master of the Maze.