Henry Ireton (two sons-in-law and a grandson of the old Protector); with such profligates as Lord Howard of Escrick and Sir Henry Blount; and with scoundrels of the type of Dangerfield and Oates. An allusion to Dangerfield, notorious among his other crimes and treacheries for a seditious paper found in a meal-tub, is found in connection with the club in The Loyal Subject's Litany, one of the innumerable satires of the period, in which occur the lines: "From the dark-lanthorn Plot, and the Green Ribbon Club From brewing sedition in a sanctified Tub, Libera nos, Domine". Activities 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