In 1678 Giant Pope did not greatly affright the celestial pilgrims: but eight years later, Protestants trembled. The emperor was bringing the Calvinist nobles of Hungary under Catholic domination, an aggressive papist was on the throne of England, a Catholic elector had succeeded to the Palatinate, Louis XIV had revoked the Edict of Nantes and persuaded the duke of Savoy to march once again into the valleys of the Vaudois. There were those who feared that the morale of the disunited forces of Protestantism would be unequal to the trial. ‘If God have yet any pleasure in the Reformation’, wrote Burnet from his exile in Holland in 1686, ‘He will yet raise it up again, though I confess the deadness of those Churches that own it makes me apprehend that it is to be quite laid in ashes.’ This pessimism was soon confounded and Burnet proceeded to an Anglican bishopric, though for long he remained apprehensive on the score of popery.

It is true that the years 1688–1715 saw the completion of an intolerant Catholic domination in France and Poland. After some vacillation, Louis XIV reaffirmed his ruthless policies in a declaration of March 1715 by which Protestants were deprived of all legal status, the mere fact of continued residence in France being taken as ‘proof that they have embraced the Roman, Catholic and Apostolic religion’. Five months later, as Louis lay dying, nine men, practically all that was left of the Calvinist pastorate, met in a quarry in Languedoc to hold the first synod since the Revocation and to initiate the secret and painful rebuilding of the churches of the ‘desert’.