Matthew Bridges

Matthew Bridges was born in Maldon, Essex, on July 14, 1800, and was raised in the Church of England. He began publishing with the poem Jerusalem Regained in 1825 and followed it with historical and religious prose, including The Roman Empire under Constantine the Great in 1828. That early book criticized Roman Catholic claims, but the Oxford Movement and John Henry Newman later influenced Bridges in the opposite direction. He entered the Roman Catholic Church in 1848 and remained Catholic for the rest of his life.

Bridges published Hymns of the Heart in 1847 and enlarged it in a second edition in 1851. That edition introduced Crown Him with Many Crowns in six eight-line stanzas under a Latin heading from Revelation 19:12. He repeated the text in The Passion of Jesus in 1852 under a different devotional title. His other hymns include Behold the Lamb of God and My God, Accept My Heart This Day.

He lived for a period in Quebec, Canada, before returning to England, where he died on October 6, 1894. His Catholic devotional imagery made some portions of Crown Him with Many Crowns difficult for Victorian Protestant editors, but the hymn's biblical vision of Christ's crucified and exalted kingship proved remarkably durable. Its later editorial history should not obscure Bridges's authorship of the original 1851 text.