Lok had some dealings with the Duke of Lennox and the Earl of Bothwell and in November 1590 he was in Edinburgh,[1] In 1591 he contributed a sonnet to the Essayes of a Prentice, by James VI of Scotland and in May he reported on the North Berwick Witch Trials to Cecil.
[2] A persistent petitioner, early in 1597 Lok was, according to his own account, encouraged by the Countess of Warwick to apply to Sir Robert Cecil for a pension to tide him over.
Lok's miscellaneous appeals resulted in his obtaining confidential employment in 1599 in Bayonne and the Basque country, collecting political gossip.
In 1593 Richard Field obtained a license to print a work entitled The first Parte of Christian Passions, conteyninge a hundred Sonnets of Meditation, Humiliation, and Prayer.
An address to the reader, in which he refers to earlier paraphrases of Ecclesiastes by Theodore Beza, Tremellius, and others, is followed by commendatory verses, including some in Latin, by John Lyly, and others in English by 'M.C.,' i.e. Michael Cosworth, Lok's cousin.