Ride on, ride on in majesty  

Henry Hart Milman (1791-1868), who wrote the words of this hymn, was educated at Eton and Brasenose College, Oxford, where he won all the glittering prizes.  In 1821 Milman was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford.  In 1835, Robert Peel made him Rector of St Margaret's, Westminster, and a Canon of Westminster, and in 1849 he became Dean of St Paul's.  In addition to historical and theological works, he wrote three volumes of verse drama, translated Aeschylus and Euripides, edited Horace, edited Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and wrote a score of hymns.  This hymn was written in response to a request from  Reginald Heber (1783–1826) for texts for a hymn book.  Heber also asked Walter Scott and Robert Southey for texts.  Milman sent several, Scott one, Southey none.  Heber’s collection was published posthumously by his wife as Hymns Written and Adapted to the Weekly Church Service of the Year (London: John Murray, 1827).

The tune now called Winchester New appeared with no composer’s name in two German collections in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, setting different words.  It entered English as “Swift German Tune” in 1742 in John Wesley’s A Collection of Tunes, Set to Music, As they are commonly Sung at the Foundery.   Thomas Moore first named it for the Hampshire cathedral city i his Psalm Singer’s Compleat Tutor and Divine Companion (London, 1750) and then the adjective “New” was added in the Whitefieldian collection The Divine Musical Miscellany (London, 1754).  The word ‘New” distinguished it from the tune setting “While Shepherds watched their flocks,” already called “Winchester,” which thus became “Winchester Old.”  William J. Havergal  reworked the tune into long metre for his Old Church Psalmody (1864), naming it “Crasselius,” the Latinized name of the German Lutheran minister who wrote the Ger “Dir, dir, Jehovah” with which it was paired in 1704, and whom Havergal mistook for the composer of the tune as well.  W.H. Monk adapted and arranged it for A&M in 1861.