Hugh Paulinus de Cressy was born at Thorpe Salvin, Yorkshire, about 1605, the son of Hugh de Cressy, barrister of Lincoln's Inn, and later a justice of the Court of King's Bench (Ireland), and Margery d'Oylie of London, daughter of Thomas D'Oylie, a highly regarded doctor and scholar of Spanish, (and a close connection by marriage of Francis Bacon) and his wife Anne Perrott of North Leigh.
[1] Having taken Anglican orders, after leaving Oxford he served as chaplain to Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, and then to Lucius Cary, 3rd Viscount Falkland, whom Cressy accompanied to Ireland in 1638.
Through the noble connections[2] he had made while chaplain to Viscount Falkland he received the post of canon in the collegiate chapter of Windsor, Berkshire, in 1642, but was not able to occupy the position due to the troubled times England was experiencing then.
George Henry Tavard believes this decision was hastened by events of the English Civil War which brought Cressy to exile in France, where a number of Anglican High-Church adherents found French Catholicism not far from their own sympathies.
[5] Cressy also spent time at Ditchley park owing to his friendship with Anne, countess of Rochester[2] who was grandmother to Charles II son in law Edward Henry Lee.
only published, Rouen, 1668), gives an exhaustive account of the foundation of monasteries during the Saxon heptarchy, and asserts that they followed the Benedictine Rule, differing in this respect from many historians.
The work was criticized by Lord Clarendon, but defended by Anthony à Wood in his Athenae Oxoniensis, who supports Cressy's statement that it was compiled from original manuscripts and from the Annales Ecclesiae of Michael Alford, William Dugdale's Monasticon, and the Decem Scriptores Historiae Anglicanae.
Cressy also edited Walter Hilton's Scale of Perfection (London, 1659); Dom Augustine Baker's Sancta Sophia (2 vols, Douai, 1657);[7] and Julian of Norwich's Sixteen Revelations on the Love of God (1670).