[3] Lee was a curate at Calverton when he is said to have developed the machine because a woman whom he was courting showed more interest in knitting than in him (or alternatively that his wife was a very slow knitter).

Refused a patent by Queen Elizabeth I, he built an improved machine that increased the number of needles per inch from 8 to 20 and produced a silk of finer texture, but the queen again denied him a patent because of her concern for the employment security of the kingdom's many hand knitters whose livelihood might be threatened by such mechanization.

"[5] Most likely the Queen’s concern was a manifestation of the hosiers’ guilds' fear that the invention would make the skills of its artisan members obsolete.

Lee began stocking manufacture in Rouen, France, and prospered until, shortly before Henry's assassination in 1610,[2] he signed a contract with Pierre de Caux to provide knitting machines for the manufacture of silk and wool stockings in 1614 and that is his last known record.

[3] After Lee's death, his workers and probably his brother James returned to England and disposed of most of the frames in London before moving to Thoroton, near Nottingham where Lee's apprentice John Aston (or Ashton), a miller, had continued to work on the frame and produced a number of improvements.