A hymn which identifies Christ as the King of kings and Lord of Lords with many crowns upon His head is “Crown Him With Many Crowns.” The original text was written by Matthew Bridges who was born at Malden in Essex, England, on July 14, 1800. Educated to be a minister in the Church of England, his main interests were literature and history, and he published a book entitled The Roman Empire Under Constantine the Great, which contained many passages against the Roman Catholic Church. However, in 1848, under the influence of John Henry Newman and others in the Oxford Movement, he went into the Catholic Church.
As a writer, Bridges’s other published works include political pieces and several volume of history. However, he is best known today for his religious poetry, from which several hymns have found their way into common usage. Most of them were introduced into the United States by Henry Ward Beecher. His “Crown Him With Many Crowns” first appeared in 1851 in the second edition of Bridges’s Hymns of the Heart and consisted of six stanzas. The tune (Diademata) was composed for this hymn by George Job Elvey (1816-1893). He was music director at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor, England, where the British royal family often attended. It first appeared with Bridges’s text in the 1868 Appendix to Hymns Ancient and Modern.
Then, in 1874, 23 years after the hymn first appeared, six additional stanzas were written by Anglican minister Godfrey Thring (1823-1903). These first appeared in his 1874 Hymns and Sacred Lyrics. Most books today use a composite of stanzas drawn from both Bridges and Thring. Bridges spent some of his latter years in Canada, but returned to England where he died at Sidmouth in Devonshire on Oct. 6, 1894.
