Pastime with Good Company

“Pastime with Good Company” is Henry VIII’s song in the novel, a recurring courtly refrain whose jaunty assurance contrasts with the uncertainty surrounding love, marriage, and succession. Heard through Thomas Wyatt’s longing for Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell’s unsparing political judgment, the song becomes more than entertainment: it exposes the distance between the king’s performance of youthful pleasure and the consequences of his desires.

The Song at Court

The song appears amid the court’s celebrations, where music accompanies the performance of power. At a feast after Anne’s installation, Stephen Gardiner and Thomas Cromwell walk toward the gathering while musicians play; the singers take up the refrain, and the king calls Thomas Wyatt to sing with him, alongside the musician Mark. The song belongs to a public world in which the king’s presence shapes the room, even as other listeners interpret his performance differently.

That courtly setting gives the refrain an edge. Henry is past forty, and the song’s evocation of youth sounds melancholy to Cromwell and Wyatt rather than simply celebratory. The king’s music can command attention, but it cannot make the present troubles disappear: Anne’s rise, the king’s marriage plans, and the uncertain futures of those drawn into them remain close at hand.

Wyatt’s Response

For Wyatt, the song carries a private ache. Speaking with Cromwell about his past attachment to Anne, he says that hearing Henry sing “Pastime With Good Company” makes something inside him want to howl. The response connects the king’s cheerful performance to Wyatt’s account of a painful courtship in which Anne sometimes allowed his attentions and at other times refused them, leaving him unsure of what he meant to her.

Cromwell answers Wyatt’s account by distinguishing between Anne’s calculated handling of courtship and the idea that she was necessarily the lover Wyatt feared she might be. He suggests that her refusals to powerful men, including the king, show her capacity to control her own choices. The song therefore sits at a revealing angle to the conversation: for Henry it is associated with youthful pleasure, while for Wyatt it sounds like an emblem of the desire and loss that courtly life has left unresolved.

Love, Power, and Performance

Cromwell’s reading of the song is also political. He describes Henry’s verses as repetitive and self-centred, a judgment that makes the king’s performance part of the novel’s wider portrait of authority. The monarch sings of pastimes and love while his intended marriage to Anne depends on efforts in Parliament and on breaking the bishops’ opposition. Private desire and public policy are not separate stories: the court’s music accompanies a struggle over who may marry, who may rule, and what legal authority will recognize.

The contrast becomes especially pointed as Henry’s marriage to Anne moves from intention to ceremony. On 25 January 1533, the pair exchange vows in a chapel at Whitehall, in near secrecy and before a small group of witnesses. The earlier courtly song cannot settle what those vows mean for the realm; their consequences depend on law, political recognition, and the succession. Against that changing reality, “Pastime with Good Company” remains a familiar performance whose carefree surface does not match the weight of the king’s choices.

Recurrence and Meaning

The song’s returns connect separate moments of the narrative without erasing their differences. At court, it is part of the music and sociability surrounding royal display; in Wyatt’s account, it becomes a trigger for private sorrow. In each setting, the king’s voice is heard through another person’s circumstances, so the same refrain gathers meanings beyond what Henry may intend by singing it.

The expression thus crystallizes one of the novel’s persistent contrasts: political life is staged through ceremonies, songs, and carefully managed appearances, yet those performances are entangled with personal histories and consequential acts. Henry’s song evokes a younger self, but its effect in the present is to recall the people and costs that his pursuit of love and power has brought into view.