If Lisa was involved with both Spencer and Mertz, maybe she was an informant for Spenser.
Of course, there was always the possibility that she had come up with the idea of distracting Spenser, but he found that hard to believe.
He must have given general satisfaction, for even before Parker's death two persons so different as Burghley and Dean Nowell independently recommended Grindal's appointment as his successor, and Spenser speaks warmly of him in the Shepherd's Calendar as the "gentle shepherd Algrind."
Oldham wrote other satires, notably one "addressed to a friend about to leave the university," which contains a well-known description of the state of slavery of the private chaplain, and another "dissuading from poetry," describing the ingratitude shown to Edmund Spenser, whose ghost is the speaker, to Samuel Butler and to Abraham Cowley.
He was the son of Thomas Ken of Furnival's Inn, who belonged to an ancient stock, - that of the Kens of Ken Place, in Somersetshire; his mother was a daughter of the now forgotten poet, John Chalkhill, who is called by Walton an "acquaintant and friend of Edmund Spenser."
