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The Agent on the steps
The tombstone embedded in the wall of the stairs of St. Mary’s in the Fort
Taking a few visitors from abroad to look around St. Mary’s in the Fort recently, I was busy explaining that the steps outside the Church led to a pew on high where sat the Governor and his retinue looking down on the rest of the congregation i
n a splendid display of class (caste?) distinction, when one of the visitors more eagle-eyed than the rest spotted a lone plaque on the outer wall of the steps and wondered who it remembered in isolation and why? Not having noticed it before, I took a closer look – and discovered that it is one of the oldest British tombstones in India, in fact, 350 years old this year.
Having forgotten most of my Latin, I couldn’t decipher all that was said on it, but there was enough of it decipherable to state that it recalled Henry Greenhill, who had died in January 1658, aged 45. Greenhill, I knew, was a contemporary of Francis Day and Andrew Cogan; in fact, there’s a twice-told tale that Francis Day chose the inhospitable site where Fort St George was raised and from which Madras grew to stay closer to a lady fair(?) he had in San Thomé and that when he left in 1644 Greenhill succeeded to her charms.
Greenhill, who had arrived in 1632 to serve in the Masulipatam factory, was Agent in Madras from 1648 to 1652 and from 1655 to 1659. ‘Agent’ was the early description of the First in Council and this later became ‘President’ before becoming ‘Governor’.
Greenhill’s two periods of agency were marked by constant bickering in the Council, with charges and countercharges being freely traded. Not the least amongst them was an attempt at blackmail by Thomas and Elizabeth Bland who claimed that she had been forced by Greenhill to abort in the fifth month the child, Greenhill’s, she had been carrying! Despite Greenhill’s reputation with the ladies, the Council acquitted him of the charge when Elizabeth Bland confessed that hers was an attempt “to have made a profit by her Scandalls from the Agent.” None of this could have warranted that bit of tombstone from the Old Guava Garden Cemetery (where the Law College buildings later came up) being given a place of prominence in St. Mary’s when the earliest tombstones of Madras were shifted there in the 1750s. If anything, Greenhill was honoured for meeting Raja Sriranga Raya of Vijayanagar and negotiating with him and receiving a confirmatory cowle for the grant to the East India Company of those three square miles of sand from where Madras grew. The grant Day had received was only from a Nayak, a local Governor; now, in 1645, the Raja was making it formal. So, Day and Cogan don’t get remembered in Madras but Greenhill does – at least, by inference.
More fascinating than all this, however, are two reports of Greenhill’s death. One said, “…wee had the Sad news of the Death of our Agent Greenhill…They say, hee, being very much Sweld, was perswaded per the Surgeons to bee tapt, to let out the Beaveridge, after which hee lived but 2 dayes…” The second letter said, “Lately came to our eares newes of Agent Greenhills drawing off, having infurtiated his Corpus magnum with an overplus of beverage, and so being tapt for it. He dyed the next morning, being the fourth of this month (January 1658).”
Any of my readers who are doctors will no doubt find such medication of considerable interest.
S. MUTHIAH
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