According to the British Merchant of 1721, John Methuen “deserved to have his Statue erected in every Trading Town in Great Britain,” for “his great Abilities did not only enrich his Country while he lived, but left a most valuable inheritance behind him, and we reap the Fruits of his Wisdom and Love to his Country at this Hour.” No statues are known, though Methuen’s name was bestowed on a city in Massachusetts. The Merchant was echoing a political speech, and it had become a piece of Whig mythology that Methuen (and thus the Whigs) had founded the lucrative Portugal trade.
The present work explores all the Methuen negotiations, making extensive use of original correspondence, and is indispensable for English and Portuguese economic and diplomatic history and for the study of the War of the Spanish Succession.
Methuen’s background (a clothier’s son trained in chancery law) and his experience as minister in Lisbon and as commissioner for trade made him uniquely equipped to clinch on his own responsibility “the shortest, simplest and perhaps the most famous of all commercial treaties”: it consisted of only two articles.
In Portugal it is often argued that the admission of English woolens killed Portuguese industry. Methuen seems to have expected this, though Francis points out that the English imports were of kinds not made in Portugal. English historians have wondered if Methuen’s treaty was as important as was supposed in the eighteenth century. Lodge’s assertion that it was a mere adjunct to the Commonwealth Treaty of 1654 is suspect, for English trade had greatly fallen away. Methuen certainly enabled the members of the new English middle class to indulge their taste for fortified wine from Oporto. But the Portuguese were enabled to buy greater quantities of English goods (not merely woolens), because the discovery of the General Mines in Brazil furnished them with gold: without Ouro Preto, Methuen’s treaty could scarcely have become the “idol of the Whig party.”
Francis opens with a useful account of Portugal in the time of Pedro II. He does not refer to the English abandonment of Tangier, which clearly influenced events. In his exposition he relies a little too much on summaries of dispatches—his own style is more readable.
