John Courtenay: “On the red herring scent of American taxation”

This week I learned from the Words for Granted podcast that one of the first documented uses of the phrase “red herring” as a metaphor for a distracting false lead arose from the American Revolution.

For centuries “red herring” meant a herring preserved by smoking, or a kipper. There are also references from the late 1600s to smelly red herrings being used to train horses or dogs to follow a scent in preparation for hunting.

On 20 Mar 1782, a Member of Parliament named John Courtenay (1738-1816) was speaking in the House of Commons. Courtenay was a former British army lieutenant born in Ireland. He represented Tamworth in the 1780s, but really he was a witty mouthpiece for his political patrons, at this point Viscount (later Marquess) Townshend.

As reported in volume 6 of The Parliamentary Register, published later in 1782:

The noise, clamour, and cry to adjourn were so strong, that Mr. Courtenay, though he spoke in a strong, and elevated tone of voice, could scarcely be heard, upon which he called out very audibly, “that neither his temper, disposition, nor country, inclined him to be intimidated, embarrassed, or easily put out of countenance, he would therefore finish what he had to say before he sat down,” which was, that though he had not the honour of being one of those sagacious country gentlemen, who have so long vociferated for the American war, (a war which he should ever think impolitic, unjust, and inexpedient) who had so long run on the red herring scent of American taxation, before they found out there was no game on foot; they, who like (their prototype) Don Quixote, had mistaken the barber’s bason for a golden helmet, he now congratulated them on having, at last, recovered their senses, and found out their error…

The references to “country gentlemen” and “no game on foot” clearly tie this metaphor to aristocratic rural hunters. Courtenay thus presented “American taxation” as a foolish and distracting political goal, not worth chasing.

As I’ve noted before, at the start of the unrest in America, British printers were still prosecuted for reporting on speeches in Parliament. John Almon had started to issue the Parliamentary Register in 1775, just in time for the American war.

By the 1780s reporting on debates had become acceptable enough for John Stockdale to issue Beauties of the British Senate: Taken from the Debates of the Debates of the Lords and Commons, as a “greatest hits” collection of rhetoric with extracts of speeches back to Robert Walpole’s ministry. Courtenay’s entries were listed in the contents under “Humour,” “Remarkable Sayings,” “Satire,” “Simile,” and “Wit” rather than, say, “East-India Affairs” or “Freedom of Election.” The red herring speech, rendered in first-person present instead of third-person past, was one of his memorable “Similes.”

A few years later, Courtenay broke with William Pitt’s party to join Charles James Fox’s opposition. Deploying truckloads of sarcasm, he supported the changes across the Channel in Philosophical Reflections on the Late Revolution in France (1790). In parliamentary debate Courtenay reminded Edmund Burke “how he exulted at the victories of the rebel [George] Washington.”

Many authorities credit William Cobbett (1763-1835, shown above) with coining the metaphor of a “red herring,” based on a story he published in his Political Register weekly in 1807 and expanded in 1833. Cobbett did indeed use the phrase “political red herring” at the end of a shaggy-dog story about him as a boy drawing hounds off the scent of a hare with a kipper.

However, in that period Cobbett and his printer, Thomas Curson Hansard, were also publishing their own Parliamentary Debates reports and a multi-volume Parliamentary History of England. Volume 22 of Cobbett’s Parliamentary History, which came out in 1814, presented Courtenay’s speech as printed back in 1782, with changes only in punctuation. So Cobbett knew about Courtenay’s earlier use.

TOMORROW: An even earlier appearance.