37. Crown Him with Many Crowns

The Story Behind the Hymn

Matthew Bridges was an English writer, historian, and poet who was raised within the Church of England but converted to Roman Catholicism in his thirties, in 1848, a fairly significant and in some social circles genuinely costly personal decision to make in nineteenth-century England, where considerable anti-Catholic prejudice remained widespread in both public life and polite society, and where such conversions could carry real professional and social consequences for the individuals who made them.

He drew this hymn's central and recurring image directly from Revelation 19:12, which describes the returning, triumphant Christ at the end of history as wearing 'many crowns' upon His head simultaneously — a striking and deliberate departure from the far more familiar and emotionally resonant image, found throughout Christian art and devotion, of Christ instead wearing a single crown of thorns during His crucifixion. Bridges's hymn instead pictures Christ at the culmination of history crowned again and again, layer upon layer, as though every conceivable form of sovereignty, honor, and rightful authority in the universe belonged to Him simultaneously and without any rival claim.

The hymn as originally written by Bridges in 1851 was later revised and substantially expanded by Godfrey Thring, an Anglican clergyman working roughly two decades later who felt that several of Bridges's original verses carried theological emphases — particularly around devotion to Mary and to the saints — too distinctly and specifically Catholic in character for comfortable, uncontroversial use in mainstream Protestant congregational worship, and who accordingly wrote a set of alternate verses of his own to substitute for the ones he considered doctrinally unsuitable for Protestant hymnals.

As a direct result of this later revision, most hymnals published today print a blended, composite version of the hymn combining stanzas originally written by both men — a fairly unusual and rarely acknowledged case of a single, now widely beloved hymn being effectively co-authored across a real denominational divide, by two writers working independently and roughly two decades apart, neither of whom set out to write in collaboration with the other, yet whose combined work now stands as a single unified hymn in nearly every modern hymnal.