Returning to London two years later, Quick gathered a Presbyterian congregation in a small meeting house in Middlesex Court, Bartholomew Close and Smithfield.
On the eve of easier times, his London ministry “successful to the conversion of many,” says Edmund Calamy[2] was relatively undisturbed; the Glorious Revolution and the Toleration Act 1688 eventually brought persecution to an end.
Known as “a serious, good preacher” with a “great facility and freedom in prayer,”[2] John Quick continued to serve his people faithfully until his death on 29 April 1706.
During his early ministry, he became acquainted with the Huguenot refugees, some of whom landed at Plymouth from La Rochelle in 1681—the year the dragonnades began.
Besides published sermons of his own, he also prepared for publication a selection of fifty brief biographies of eminent pastors, theologians, and martyrs of the French Reformed Church, the Icones Sacrae Gallicanae.
[5] These ambitious ventures failed with the death in 1700 of William Russell, 1st Duke of Bedford (the dedicatee of the Synodicon) who had offered to assist with the cost.