Pastime with good company

young-henry-viii

There was more to Henry VIII than head-chopping and monastery-bashing…

Bloody Tudors everywhere at the moment. I’ve been reading Hilary Mantel, watching BBC Two’s Tudor season, and now I can’t get this song out of my head. ‘I’m ‘Enery the Eighth I am’, Joe Brown claims in a tale about a man called Henry who marries a woman who has had seven previous husbands, each of whom was also called Henry. A rather far-fetched scenario, I’d say, but I suppose Henry VIII is worth a bit of contrivance to get into a song title because he looms so large in the English collective consciousness (you wouldn’t bother with a similar song ‘I’m George the Fourth I am I am’, for example.)

The image of Henry VIII that usually springs to mind is of an obese, wife-slaughtering giant as played by Charles Laughton, but the young Henry was quite the renaissance man, physically impressive and good at everything, including fencing, dancing, jousting hunting, poetry and singing. And at around 18 – the age he is in the picture above – he composed the smash hit of his day, Pastime with Good Company (aka “The Kynges Balade”) – which has a tune so catchy and enduring that Jethro Tull were still covering it four hundred years later. Here’s a rendition by the King’s Singers…

There is no doubt that Henry wrote Pastime with Good Company, but more uncertainty surrounds another composition attributed to him. The transcript of Helas Madame – a song in Middle French consisting of a conversation in which a man asks a woman if he might be her ‘humble servant’ – was found on a manuscript used in Henry’s court, but various parts of the song are apparently lifted from earlier European works. Anyway, it is worth a listen…

One tune Henry VIII definitely did not write, contrary to the popular myth, is Greensleeves. The old story goes that Henry composed it for Anne Boleyn while still pursuing her, but in fact the song is in an imported Italian style that didn’t reach England until the reign of his daughter Elizabeth. Personally I don’t see this as a mark against Henry, since I find the melody to be dreary verging on nauseating, but Vaughan Williams did the best he could for it, with his famous Fantasia…

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