Green Ribbon Club

The Green Ribbon Club served both as a debating society and an intelligence department for the Whig faction and for promoting the Exclusion Bill and the pretensions of the Duke of Monmouth. They met at the King's Head Tavern at Chancery Lane End, so was also known as the King's Head Club.

Founded around 1675, it was a resort for members of the political party hostile to the court. The Duke of Monmouth was a frequent visitor and the members wore a bow, or bob of green ribbon in their hats as a distinguishing badge, useful for the purpose of mutual recognition in street brawls.

The frequenters of the club were the extreme faction of the country party, the men who supported Titus Oates, and who were concerned in the Rye House Plot and Monmouth's rebellion.

Statesmen like Halifax, Shaftesbury, Buckingham, Macclesfield, Cavendish, Bedford, Grey of Warke, and Herbert of Cherbury, were members, together with third-rate writers such as Scroop, Mulgrave and Shadwell, with remnants of the Cromwellian régime like Falconbridge, Henry Ireton and Claypole, with such profligates as Lord Howard of Escrick, Sir Henry Blount, Dangerfield and Oates.

The club members went about in silk armour, supposed to be bullet proof, in which any man dressed up was as safe as a house, 'for it was impossible to strike him for laughing', while in their pockets they carried the weapon of offence invented by Stephen College and known as the Protestant Flail.

In the general election of January and February 1679, the Whig interest in England was managed and controlled by a committee sitting at the club in Chancery Lane. 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 proved an effective means of inflaming the religious passions of the populace.

The failure to carry the Exclusion Bill, one of the favourite projects of the faction, resulted in the club's decline 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, a green-ribbon man, was executed in front of the Kings Head Tavern 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.

The precise situation of the King's Head Tavern, was over against the Inner Temple Gate, at the corner of Fleet Street and Chancery Lane, on the east side of the latter thoroughfare.