the country was managed and controlled by a committee sitting at the club in Chancery Lane. The club's organizing activity was also effective in the agitation of the Petitioners in 1679. This celebrated movement was engineered by 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 short-lived. Decline The failure to carry the Exclusion Bill, one of the favourite projects of the faction, was a blow to its influence, which declined rapidly after the flight of Shaftesbury, the confiscation of the city of London's charter, and the discovery of the Rye House Plot, in which many of its members were implicated. In 1685 John Ayloffe, who was found to have been a dubber at the King's Head Tavern and a green-ribbon man, was executed in front of the premises on the spot where the pope-burning bonfires had been kindled; and although the tavern was still in existence in the time of Queen Anne, the Green Ribbon Club which made it famous did not survive the accession of James II. Back to life, in 2023 After over 350 years and in the very same location, The Green Ribbon Club is back in business. A members-only speakeasy The Green Ribbon Club is now paying homage to the rich history of the site at 193 Fleet Street. The Green Ribbon Club is open below the Boutique Hair Salon, Maison Arslan. See also Secret Treaty of Dover Notes References Attribution Endnotes: Sir George Sitwell, The First Whig (Scarborough, 1894), containing an illustration of the Green Ribbon Club and a pope burning procession; Roger North, Examen (London, 1740); Anchitell Grey, Debates of the House of Commons, 1667-1684, vol. viii. (10 vols., London, 1769); Sir John Bramston, the younger, Autobiography (Camden