Charles’ wisdom in this course cannot be questioned. Before the last session Ferguson the Plotter had returned from concealment in Holland. An agent of Essex was busy in London concerning “the linen manufacture,” for which he had enrolled three or four hundred men and spent as much as a thousand pounds. Hugh Speke sent down to the country to have his horse ready. “Get him in as good case as you can,” he wrote, “for God knows what use I may have for him and how suddenly.” There is reason to think that Shaftesbury had been planning to place Parliament under control of the city.[444] London had always armed the Whigs with the possibility of support other than parliamentary. The removal of Parliament to Oxford made it certain that the coming struggle would be fought on ground favourable to the king. No sooner was Charles’ determination known than Shaftesbury, Monmouth, and Essex, together with thirteen other peers, presented a petition shewing that evil men, favourers of popery and enemies of the happiness of England, had made choice of Oxford as a place where the Houses would be daily menaced by the swords of papists who had crept into the ranks of the king’s guards, and making their humble prayer and advice that the parliament should sit at Westminster as usual. “That, my lord, may be your opinion,” returned the king to Essex; “it is not mine.”[445] The Whigs promptly set to making the elections their own. Nothing was omitted to secure their success. Instructions from the Green Ribbon Club directed events in all parts of the country. Members bound themselves to prosecute the Plot, to demand restriction of the king’s power to prorogue and dissolve Parliament, to support the Exclusion, the right of petitioning, the Association.[446] When the means of man were exhausted, supernatural powers were called to assist. On the one side and on the other were raised ghosts, who foretold doom to their opponents. The city of London elected its old representatives. They were begged to refuse supplies and assured that in pursuit of their ends they should have the support of the citizens’ lives and fortunes. A host of scribblers, libellers, and caricaturists poured into Oxford. A rumour was spread that the city would be the scene of a massacre. The Whig chiefs rode down attended by bands of armed retainers. Guards of townsmen accompanied members from the boroughs. The Londoners appeared in a great company with bows of blue satin in their hats, on which were woven the inscription: “No Popery! No Slavery!” Tory crowds met them at the gates, red-ribboned, brandishing clubs and staves, and crying, “Make ready! Stand to it! Knock ’em down! Knock ’em down!” In the midst of his life-guards, among whom Essex had failed at Charles’ polite request to point out the creeping papists, the king drove from Windsor. Information had come to hand of a plot to kidnap him at Oxford. Measures were taken accordingly. A regiment was moved up to the Mews in