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Thousands of Huguenot refugees arrived in England and Ireland after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. An impressive number of these refugees carved out careers for themselves in the book trade, taking advantage of the new conditions in which the trade operated after 1688. This paper examines how these exiles developed the genre of the political ‘key’ to literary works to turn translations of Rabelais, the great French comic and satirical writer, into attacks upon the history of intolerance and persecution in early modern France. In doing so, they articulated the sentiment that was common among Whigs and Dissenters when they evaluated the events of 1688-9 in a European context: that the Glorious Revolution was in many respects England’s answer to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.