Charles Bridges was christened in the parish of Barton Seagrave in Northamptonshire, England, on April 2, 1672, the son of John Bridges and Elizabeth Trumbull Bridges. He came from a well-educated gentry family, and his brother John Bridges was a barrister and one of the first and most laborious historians of Northamptonshire. Charles Bridges married Alice Flower on August 4, 1687, at Saint Marylebone, near London. They had at least one son and two daughters. He was an agent of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge by 1699 and served as a liaison with local charity schools at least until 1713, when his name disappears from the society’s records. Bridges may have been trained as a painter and begun a career as a portraitist, though the only English portrait firmly attributable to him is one of Thomas Baker, a fellow of Saint John’s College, University of Cambridge, painted after 1717.