Author: Bridges, Matthew
Biography:
BRIDGES, Matthew (1800-94: ancestry.co.uk)
He was the youngest of thirteen children born to John Bridges and his wife Margaretta Anne Cook; they had married at Boxted, Essex, in Aug. 1785. Bridges was born on 14 July 1800 and baptised on 21 July at Maldon, Essex. His father was a solicitor in partnership with James Quilter and had premises in Red Lion Square, London; on 15 July 1816 Bridges was apprenticed to Quilter. Law work was not to his liking, however, and he travelled in Europe before marrying Sarah Fripp by license at St. James church, Bristol, on 2 Apr. 1823. Intending to become a clergyman, Bridges matriculated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, on 25 May 1831 but he left without taking a degree. His obituary in The Tablet, a Catholic periodical, states that he felt unable to sign the Thirty-Nine Articles and could not be ordained. Census records indicate that in 1841 the family was living in St. Marychurch, Devon, and his Babbicombe, or Visions of Memory, with Other Poems (1842) is set there. Bridges is also recorded at this time as the proprietor of Aldershot Manor in Surrey; likely it was in Surrey that he three times unsuccessfully sought election to parliament as stated in The Tablet obituary. In 1846 he converted to Roman Catholicism. Sarah Bridges died on 13 June 1857 and by the time of the 1861 Census he had married Elizabeth Maria Knight (b 1828 in Shepton Mallet, Bristol), a Catholic. They lived in Chester Hill House in Woodchester, Gloucestershire, where their son, Henry, was born in 1865. By 1868 they had moved to Wetley Abbey, Staffordshire, where Bridges sought to establish a Catholic community. Ever restless, in about 1880 he travelled to Canada but by the late 1880s he was back in England, living with his wife in Sidmouth, Devon. He died on 6 Oct. 1894 and was buried in the grounds of the Convent of the Assumption, Sidmouth. His other publications include hymns, The Testimony of Profane Antiquity (1825), The Roman Empire Under Constantine the Great (1828), Popular Ancient and Modern Histories (1855-56), and Earnest Appeal to Evangelical Episcopalians (1864). (ancestry.co.uk 27 June 2023; Alumni Oxoniensis; The Tablet 84 [1894], 664; Brighton Gazette 7 May 1846) SR