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.