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.”
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 the country was managed and controlled by a committee sitting at the club in Chancery Lane. The club’s organizing activity was also notably effective in the agitation of the Petitioners in 1679. This celebrated movement was engineered from 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 bon-fire 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, however, short-lived. 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 clubber at the King’s Head Tavern and a green-ribon man,” was executed in front of the premises on the spot where the “pope-burning” bon-fires 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, described by North as “over against the Inner Temple Gate,” was at the corner of Fleet Street and Chancery Lane, on the east side of the latter thoroughfare.
See 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, Autobiography (Camden Soc., London, 1845). (R. J. M.)
GREENSAND, in geology, the name that has been applied to
no fewer than three distinct members of the Cretaceous System,
viz. the Upper Greensand (see Gault), the Lower Greensand
and the so-called Cambridge Greensand, a local phase of the base
of the Chalk (q.v.). The term was introduced by the early
English geologists for certain sandy rocks which frequently
exhibited a greenish colour on account of the presence of minute
grains of the green mineral glauconite. Until the fossils of these
rocks came to be carefully studied there was much confusion
between what is now known as the Upper Greensand (Selbornian)
and the Lower Greensand. Here we shall confine our attention
to the latter.
The Lower Greensand was first examined in detail by W. H. Fitton (Q.J.G.S. iii., 1847), who, in 1845, had proposed the name “Vectine” for the formation. The name was revived under the form “Vectian” in 1885 by A. J. Jukes-Browne, because, although sands and sandstones prevail, the green colour has often changed by oxidation of the iron to various shades of red and brown, and other lithological types, clays and limestones represent this horizon in certain areas. The Lower Greensand is typically developed in the Wealden district, in the Isle of Wight, in Dorsetshire about Swanage, and it appears again beneath the northern outcrop of the Chalk in Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Bedfordshire, and thence it is traceable through Norfolk and Lincolnshire into east Yorkshire. It rests conformably upon the Wealden formation in the south of England, but it is clearly separable from the beds beneath by the occurrence of marine fossils, and by the fact that there is a marked overlap of the Lower Greensand on the Weald in Wiltshire, and derived pebbles are found in the basal beds. The whole series is 800 ft. thick at Atherfield in the Isle of Wight, but it thins rapidly westward. It is usually clearly marked off from the overlying Gault.
In the Wealden area the Lower Greensand has been subdivided as follows, although the several members are not everywhere recognizable:—
| Isle of Wight. | |
| Folkestone Beds (70-100 ft.) | Carstone and Sand rock series. |
| Sandgate Beds (75-100 ft.) | Ferruginous Sands (Shanklin sands). |
| Hythe Beds (80-300 ft.) | Ferruginous Sands (Walpen sands). |
| Atherfield Clay (20-90 ft.) | Atherfield Clay. |
The Atherfield Clay is usually a sandy clay, fossiliferous. The basal portion, 5-6 ft., is known as the “Perna bed” from the abundance of Perna Mulleti; other fossils are Hoplites Deshayesii, Exogyra sinuata, Ancyloceras Mathesonianum. The Hythe beds are interstratified thin limestones and sandstones; the former are bluish-grey in colour, compact and hard, with a certain amount of quartz and glauconite. The limestone is known locally as “rag”; the Kentish Rag has been largely employed as a building stone and roadstone; it frequently contains layers of chert (known as Sevenoaks stone near that town). The sandy portions are very variable; the stone is often clayey and calcareous and rarely hard enough to make a good building stone; locally it is called “hassock” (or Calkstone). The two stones are well exposed in the Iguanodon Quarry near Maidstone (so called from the discovery of the bones of that reptile). South-west of Dorking sandstone and grit become more prevalent, and it is known there as “Bargate stone,” much used around Godalming. Pulborough stone is another local sandstone of the Hythe beds. Fuller’s earth occurs in parts of this formation in Surrey. The Sandgate beds, mainly dark, argillaceous sand and clay, are well developed in east Kent, and about Midhurst, Pulborough and Petworth. At Nutfield the celebrated fuller’s earth deposits occur on this horizon; it is also found near Maidstone, at Bletchingley and Red Hill. The Folkestone beds are light-coloured, rather coarse sands, enclosing layers of siliceous limestone (Folkestone stone) and chert; a phosphatic bed is found near the top. These beds are well seen in the cliffs at Folkestone and near Reigate. At Ightham there is a fine, hard, white sandstone along with a green, quartzitic variety (Ightham stone). In Sussex the limestone and chert are usually lacking, but a ferruginous grit, “carstone,” occurs in lenticular masses and layers, which is used for road metal at Pulborough, Fittleworth, &c.
The Lower Greensand usually forms picturesque, healthy country, as about Leith Hill, Hindhead, Midhurst, Petworth, at Woburn, or at Shanklin and Sandown in the Isle of Wight. Outside the southern area the Lower Greensand is represented by the Faringdon sponge-bearing beds in Berkshire, the Sandy and
