'I Never Gave Them Condign Punishment'

The doomed Duke of Gloucester, Henry VI’s uncle and Lord Protector of England, is a rare sympathetic presence in the history plays. In Henry VI, Part 2, despite his unearned disgrace and death, Gloucester defends his sense of mercy: 

“Pity was all the fault that was in me;

For I should melt at an offender’s tears,

And lowly words were ransom for their fault.

Unless it were a bloody murderer,

Or foul felonious thief that fleec’d poor passengers,

I never gave them condign punishment.”

 

This comes in Act III, Scene 1. In the next scene he has already been murdered by order of the Duke of Suffolk. His death illustrates what happens when justice is not condign.

That’s the word that captured my attention. In the fifteenth century it meant “worthily deserved, merited, fitting, appropriate; adequate,” the OED tells us. By Shakespeare’s time it was “commonly used only of appropriate punishment: a use originating in the phraseology of Tudor Acts of Parliament.” In his Dictionary, Dr. Johnson defines it as “worthy of a person; suitable; deserved; merited: it is always used of something deserved by crimes,” and cites Gloucester’s speech. Does anyone know if the word has any standing today in law?

 

I found it again in the last poem in Turner Cassity’s No Second Eden: Poems (2002, Swallow Press/Ohio University Press), “The Grateful Minimalist”:

 

“Aghast

A past

 

Condign

As mine

 

Could, bit

By bit,

 

Escape,

I trap

 

Its time

In rhyme:

 

The hits,

The pits;

 

Some one

On one

 

Contacts;

My acts

 

Of spite

I quite

 

Regret

(And yet

 

Would score

Once more).

 

Few works;

Some quirks.

 

No blanks,

Just thanks.”

 

The final couplet reminded me of a line from W.H. Auden’s 1969 poem “Lullaby”: “Let your last thinks all be thanks.” Then I wondered if Auden, a fancier of outré words, had ever used “condign.” Sure enough, in “The Art of Healing,” another poem from 1969, he writes: “Dear David, / dead one, rest in peace, / having been what all / doctors should be, but few are, / and, even when most / difficult, condign / of our biassed affection / and objective praise.”