Anthony, the eldest son of Richard and Eleanor, daughter of Sir John Draycot of Painsley, was brought up to be a soldier. That upbringing left him with a "lak of lernyng" for which he apologised to the Lord Deputy Bellingham in a letter dated May 1548 preserved in the Public Records Office in London, though it did not in any way embarrass him in his military or civil administration, in the performance of magisterial functions or in his membership of the Royal Household as Commander of the Gentlemen at Arms during four reigns.

Finding peace-time soldiering tedious he toyed with the idea of becoming a wool-merchant which at that stage in the nation's economic history would promise him excitement, interest, prestige and political power. The Worshipful Company of Drapers had a monopoly of the trade but admission in the ordinary way involved a seven-year apprenticeship. His younger brother Mathew adopted that course when he became apprenticed to John Mynors in 1539, but there was a back-door into the Trade by way of the Staple at Calais. Whenever his Court duties allowed Anthony would visit Calais to study the possibilities of becoming a Stapler but the nearest he got to that was to become a Stapler's son-in-law, for at Calais he met and married Thomasina Sutton, the daughter of a Stapler.

The inevitability of the resumption of wars with Scotland and France made the drain on financial and military resources involved in continuous fighting in Ireland intolerable. Henry VIII decided that the fighting would have to stop. The defeat of Silken Thomas and the Geraldine league gave him the opportunity of changing his policy from subjugation to pacification and with that end in view he appointed Sir Anthony St Leger Lord Deputy in Ireland. St Leger was a professional soldier but also an able administrator and diplomat who knew Ireland and its people well, having already had many years of service there. When he left for Ireland in 1540 he took Anthony with him as a member of his staff.

Anthony was all too willing to go with St Leger. At home he was having matrimonial troubles; Thomasina had left him and returned to her parents at Calais and from then on Calais was a place which he would not visit and the wool trade had lost its interest for him. It was not until 1572 that he was invited to join the Drapers Company but that was in a purely honorific capacity as a member of the Queen's Household and not as a wool-merchant. His Staffordshire friends and neighbours, the Agard family, had moved to Ireland three years previously and had urged him to join them there and Thomas Agard who was very much older than himself was a man for whose opinions he had the greatest respect. The Agard family owned land in Staffordshire round about the Colclough properties at Endon, Blurton, Cheadle, Wolstanton and the rest. Though their home was at Faustian, just over the border into Derbyshire, it was only ten miles from the Colclough's Delph House mansion.

Thomas Agard had been sent to Ireland as part of Henry VIII's retinue which had been detailed to set up a government in Dublin and make amends for the murder of the bishops in 1532. His function was to carry out a survey and particularly to assess the country's mineral resources and the possibility of developing lead mines. The Lord Deputy Grey had described him as "a sour and honest puritan inclined to Protestantism" and disliked him so much that he contrived to see that he got no pay for his services, but St Leger in 1553 managed to get for him a posthumous payment of £150. He died at his Hackney mansion in 1549 but not before he had become, thanks to St Leger, Controller of the Treasury, a member of the Council of Ireland, treasurer of the Irish Mint, and, for four years, Farmer of the Customs for the Ports. His son Francis, who had been born in 1529, and his daughter Clare, both of whom had joined him in Ireland, inherited his extensive Staffordshire and Derbyshire estates. Clare also had property in Calais, inherited from her cousin who had died there in 1534. In 1547 Anthony had obtained a decree of divorce from Thomasina and in 1555 he married Clare in spite of her Calais associations. In the next twenty years she bore him a dozen children but even so, on his death, she promptly remarried. Her second husband was Sir Thomas Williams, a Welshman, who died three years later in the Tower of London after strife and litigation with his stepson Sir Thomas Colclough from the day of his wedding to that of his death.

Clare's brother Francis meanwhile had become a person not only of great wealth but also of great political power. At the age of 20 he had inherited his father's Staffordshire and Derbyshire estates together with the profits of his very lucrative Irish enterprises and the latter continued to grow throughout his life. He became a Privy Councillor, Governor of Wexford, Receiver of Irish Revenues and held other crown offices as well. He made a generous marriage settlement on his sister which included, with the Agard Hackney mansion, the lease of Rosegarland which was to cause some subsequent trouble.

Anthony was not particularly interested in property dealing (which was the chief consideration of most of his compatriots in Ireland) for he was more concerned with the consolidation of the Staffordshire estates which had come to him on the death of his brother John in 1546, though there is no record of his having made any further acquisitions there after 1577 when he and Clare jointly purchased "a toft, a dovecote, a garden, 80 acres of meadow, 80 acres of deer park and 80 acres of land" in the neighbourhood of Wolstanton. He had houses in Endon, Blurton, Wolstanton and Newcastle-under-Lyme and with his marriage to Clare became possessed of the Agard London mansion in Hackney. His children were mostly brought up in England which he considered a safer place for them than Ireland, and four of his daughters found husbands in the Staffordshire area. His eldest daughter, Jacquette, married Sir Nicholas Walshe, Chief Justice of Ireland but his second, Frances, married William Smethwick of Smethwick, Cheshire; Mary, his third, married John Cols of Woodstock, Shropshire, and his fourth, Clara, firstly William Sneyd, of Sneyd, Staffordshire, and on his death, Sir Hugh Wrottesley.

The extent of the estates which he had inherited on his brother's death - the list of them reads like a gazetteer of North Staffordshire - made Anthony a person of great wealth and not requiring "entertainment", i.e. pay and expenses. This made his employment popular with the authorities who were trying to run the government of Ireland on a shoe-string with only a few thousand pounds a year to pay for the army and the civil administration. On his inheriting the estates he was reluctant to leave Ireland and the company of the Agards so he arranged that his cousin George Draycott should take over the management of them on his behalf. Draycott's administration caused some anxiety and in 1576 there is a record of an appeal to the Chancery Court by tenants of the estate for protection against his "sly practices". Apart from his Court duties as commander of the Gentlemen at Arms his estates also called for frequent visits to England and in Irish records he is constantly mentioned as being "absent in England" and many documents which had to be submitted to the Queen or the Privy Council were carried by him personally. Equally, of course, we find that where he should appear in English records he is noted as "absent in Ireland on the Queen's service". Considering the difficulties and discomforts of present-day travel between Ireland and England this mobility of Anthony and his family is bewildering. Their normal means of transport seems to have been a ship from Waterford, Wexford or Bannow Bay to Bristol which took rather more than 24 hours, and then by relays of horses to London or Wolstanton which would take another day-and-a- half. Travel to Dublin too involved a 24-hour sea-trip and this was considered safer and quicker than travel by road.

When in London he was frequently entertained by his brother Mathew at Drapers Hall and in 1572 when Mathew was one of the wardens Anthony was admitted to the livery of the Company in consideration of a suitable presentation of gold plate. As his estates were the biggest producers of wool in North Staffordshire and the Drapers were the wool-merchants who regarded the producers as their natural enemies this is at first sight surprising; however, it was not as a wool-producer that Anthony was admitted to the livery but as a member of the Royal Household who had the ear of the Queen and could act as a kind of liaison officer between her and the City - a role which he assiduously fulfilled during the remaining twelve years of his life.