King's Head Tavern with third-rate writers such as Scroop, Mulgrave and Shadwell, with remnants of the Cromwellian regime like Falconbridge, Henry Ireton and Claypole, with such profligates as Lord Howard of Escrik 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 connexion with the club in _The Loyal Subjects' 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_." 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, M.P. for Middlesex, who afterwards 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 there concerted 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 bullet proof, "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."