Staveley published only one work in his lifetime, The Romish Horseleech (1674), a political tract protesting James II's Catholicism, later held up as a "no-Popery classic".

[1][2] Professionally, Staveley practised law, serving as part of the Leicester Quorum of Justices of the peace, even through the changes of Charles II's reign.

Samuel Carte favourably records his jurisprudence, recalling he "was strictly just, abhorring all manner of fraud or bribery in his practice of the law, was very rarely observed to be in a passion".

The short treatise concerned (1) proving English claims to the French throne, while annulling Salic law; (2) the competition between the Houses of Lancaster and Plantagenet, alongside the Wars of the Roses; and (3) the successive unifications of Britain under Henry VII, James VI and I, and Charles II.

[3] Despite these interests, during his lifetime, Staveley's only published work was a religious tract: The Romish Horseleech: or an Impartial Account of the Intolerable Charge of Popery to this Nation (1674), the work "for which he is best known" according to the DNB, which protested the recent Catholic conversion of the heir presumptive, James II, the controversial Royal Declaration of Indulgence (1672), and the opposition to the Test Act (1673).

The book was published anonymously, its incendiary title added by another author, and Staveley's short "Essay of the Supremacy of the King of England" appended to it.

[5][6] The assured review referred to the book as "calculated to excite, in the minds of men, a just abhorrence of the tyrannical usurpations and gross impositions of that church".

In the later part of his life, he "acquired a melancholy habit", according to Nichols, and suffered from "the greatest pains which very severe fits of the gout exercised him", according to Carte.