Green Ribbon Club - Activism

Activism

The club was the headquarters of the Whig opposition to the court, and its members were active promoters of conspiracy and sedition. The president was either Lord Shaftesbury or Sir Robert Peyton, MP for Middlesex, who later turned informer. The Green Ribbon Club served both as a debating society and an intelligence department for the Whig faction. Questions under discussion in parliament were here threshed out by the members over their tobacco and ale; the latest news from Westminster or the city was retailed in the tavern, for some or others were continually coming and going, says Roger North, to import or export news and stories.

Slander of the court or the Tories was invented in the club and sedulously spread over the town, and measures were concerted there for pushing on the Exclusion Bill, or for promoting the pretensions of the Duke of Monmouth. The popular credulity as to Catholic outrages in the days of the Popish Plot was stimulated by the scandalmongers of the club, whose members went about in silk armour, supposed to be bulletproof, in which any man dressed up was as safe as a house, says North, for it was impossible to strike him for laughing; while in their pockets, for street and crowd-work, they carried the weapon of offence invented by Stephen College and known as the Protestant Flail.

The genius of Shaftesbury found in the Green Ribbon Club the means of constructing the first systematized political organization in England. North relates that every post conveyed the news and tales legitimated there, as also the malign constructions of all the good actions of the government, especially to places where elections were depending, to shape men's characters into fit qualifications to be chosen or rejected. In the general election of January and February 1679 the Whig interest throughout the country was managed and controlled by a committee sitting at the club in Chancery Lane.

The club's organizing activity was also notably effective in the agitation of the Petitioners in 1679. This celebrated movement was engineered from the Green Ribbon Club with all the skill and energy of a modern caucus. The petitions were prepared in London and sent down to every part of the country, where paid canvassers took them from house to house collecting signatures with an air of authority that made refusal difficult. The great pope-burning processions in 1680 and 1681, on the anniversary of Queen Elizabeth's accession, were also organized by the club. They ended by the lighting of a huge bonfire in front of the club windows; and as they proved an effective means of inflaming the religious passions of the populace, it was at the Green Ribbon Club that the mobile vulgus first received the nickname of the mob. The activity of the club was, however, short-lived.