The head that once was crowned with thorns 

The author of this hymn, Thomas Kelly (1769-1855), was born in Ireland and educated in Trinity College, Dublin (B.A. 1785).  His father was a judge, and Kelly expected to enter the law; he was admitted to the Middle Temple in London but left without finishing his studies.  [While at the Temple Kelly was often the guest of Edmund Burke, fellow countryman and family friend.]  Kelly was much influenced by his reading of the earlier evangelical William Romaine and especially by his more fiercely evangelical friend John Walker.  (The fissiparous tendencies of 18th-century evangelicals would later separate them.)  He was ordained in the Church of Ireland in 1792.  Kelly’s evangelical views and some actions, however, led to his—and Walker’s— inhibition by the Archbishop of Ireland.  In 1803 he left the established church, preaching in dissenting chapels and in a chapel that he had built; his followers were known as “Kellyites.”  Kelly wrote 765 hymns, most contained in the multiple editions of his Hymns on Various Passages of Scripture.  This hymn first appeared in the 5th edition of 1820.

 

Kelly owed his first lines to a stanza from John Bunyan's long poem One Thing Is Needful, or Serious Meditations upon the Four Lasting Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell:

           That Head that once was Crown’d with Thorns,
   Shall now with Glory shine,
That heart that broken was with Scorns,
   Shall flow with Life Divine.

The tune we sing is “St Magnus,” which first appeared as treble and bass lines in The Divine Companion of Henry Playford (1707),  a new edition of the 1701 collection with the same title of his father, John Playford.  Henry Playford added some newer material, including this tune, which had no composer’s name or tune name.  In the second edition, also printed in 1707, it was attributed to Jeremiah Clarke (ca. 1674-1707).  Clarke was a chorister for John Blow at St Paul’s and a chorister in the Chapel Royal.  From 1692 to 1695 he was organist of Winchester College, but he then returned to London and was a Gentleman Extraordinary of the Chapel Royal from 1700; he and William Croft were appointed joint organists of the Chapel from 1704 to1707.  Clark became organist of St Paul’s in 1699, soon after the new organ by Bernard Smith was installed in Wren’s new building.  In December of 1707 Jeremiah Clarke committed suicide by shooting himself; it has always been said that the cause was unhappy or unrequited love.  It was, however, neither Clark nor Playford who named the tune St Magnus, but William Riley, who used the name in his Parochial Harmony of 1762.   Riley named several tunes for London churches.  The tune was first paired with Kelly’s words in the 1868 Appendix to Hymns Ancient and Modern, with a harmonization by the musical editor, William Monk.