64 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE
circular letter to Oxford and Cambridge, asking for
help in finding chaplains on the ground that they had
‘ resolved to endeavour the advance and spreading of
the Gospel in India.’ 1 Nothing, however, seems to
have come of it. Richard Baxter is credited with
being the first to suggest to the Company missionary
work among the natives of India. This was in 1660,
the year of the Restoration, and it is stated that his
scheme of evangelisation was taken up later by Robert
Boyle, who was a director of the East India Company.?
It has been told above 3 how Boyle came to the help
of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in
New England, when at the Restoration the act of the
Interregnum, under which it had been constituted,
became invalid.
The S.P.G. had taken over from the S.P.C.K. the
charge of finding clergy for the Plantations, but India
was outside the scope of its work. The first Protestant
missions in India originated with a King of Denmark,
just as, many years later, in 1792, another King of
Denmark was the first European sovereign to prohibit
the slave trade to his subjects. The Danes had owned
Tranquebar on the eastern (the Coromandel) coast of
Southern India since 1616, when it was bought from
the ruler of Tanjore, and the first two missionaties
arrived there in the middle of 1706. It was a Lutheran
mission and seems to have been largely manned by
' Quoted in 4 History of the Church of England in India since the
Early Days of the East India Company (S.P.CK., 1924), by Eyre
Chatterton, D.D., Bishop of Nagpur, and in The Church in Madras
(Smith Elder, 1904), by the Rev. Frank Penny, p. 35. See also
The Diary of William Hedges, ut sup., II, cecli.
% See Chatterton, pp. 32-3. 3 Ut sup., p. 29.