Sprey apparently sprang from humble stock. He acquired a legal training as clerk to Christopher Walker, town clerk of Bodmin and a senior official in the Cornish Stannary courts, and evidently developed his own practice after his master’s death in 1590. His marriage to Walker’s daughter two years earlier probably boosted his income, and by the early 1590s Sprey was acquiring property in the Bodmin district. He served as the borough’s mayor in 1596-7, and by the end of the decade he was one of its wealthiest inhabitants.
Elected in 1604 to represent Bodmin in Parliament, Sprey’s private commitments proved a major obstacle to his attendance. Between April that year and May 1610 he was granted leave to depart six times, and may have missed up to half of the first session. In May 1604 he took his fellow Bodmin Member John Stone with him, which suggests that an emergency had arisen in the borough. However, in February 1607 he was required in Cornwall ‘to dispatch his business at the assizes, for his clients’ causes’, and the same reason probably lay behind his absence exactly 12 months earlier, when the clerk of the Commons simply noted that he had sought permission to leave for ‘special occasions nearly concerning him’. Sprey’s behaviour was unusual, as few Members during this period bothered to request leave to attend to legal business. Little is known of his activities in the House, but he may have participated in the attempt to achieve radical reform of purveyance during the third session. On 25 Feb. 1606, the day of Sprey’s third licence to depart, Speaker Phelips advised the earl of Salisbury (Robert Cecil†) to expect some easing of the pressure for change, since the Commons had that afternoon lost one of the ‘seedmen of this sedition’. As no other Member is known to have left the House at around that time, this remark might indicate that Sprey was one of the ‘fiery spirits’ discussed by Phelips. However, Sprey’s apparent silence during the debates on purveyance makes it more likely that the Speaker was referring to someone else.
Chosen for a second time as mayor of Bodmin in 1613, Sprey was thereby disabled in the following spring from re-entering the Commons, but his role as returning officer doubtless helped his son Christopher to secure one of the borough’s seats. Sprey had by now built up a moderate personal estate. Around this time Christopher married into a local gentry family, the Courtneys of Lanivet, and the bride was promised a jointure estate consisting of a Bodmin manor, a local rectory and around 400 acres of land. However, problems arose in implementing the marriage settlement, and an acrimonious legal battle ensued. Christopher died in 1617, leaving Sprey to resolve the dispute two years later, when the same lands were reassigned to Christopher’s eldest son Philip, his widow receiving £400 by way of compensation.
Sprey remained active as a lawyer until the end of his life, representing the defendants in a local property dispute in 1621. By 1620 he held the prestigious post of town clerk of Bodmin, effectively the borough’s recordership. Whether this office could be combined with the mayoralty is unclear, but he died on 11 Dec. 1622 while serving as mayor for a third time.