Nicholas Skeres

Nicholas Skeres (March 1563 – c. 1601) was an Elizabethan con-man and government informer—i.e. a "professional deceiver"—and one of the three "gentlemen" who were with the poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe when he was killed in Deptford in May 1593. Together with another of the men there, Robert Poley, he had played a part in the discovery of the Babington plot against the life of the Queen in 1586, and at the time of Marlowe's death was engaged in a money-lending swindle with the third of them, Marlowe's reported killer Ingram Frizer.

Skeres was born the second son of a merchant tailor, Nicholas Skeres senior, in March 1563, probably in the family's parish of All-Hallows-the-Less, near London Bridge. His father died when he was only three years old, however, leaving each of his two sons and his widow a third of his estate. In fact this included land in Yorkshire, the Skeres or Skyeres family having once lived at Skyeres Hall near Wentworth.

Despite his father's occupation, neither he nor his brother went to the Merchant Taylors' School, although according to the School's register, their cousin Ralph Skeres junior did attend in 1564. On the other hand, he does seem to have been a law student at Furnival's Inn, one of the Inns of Chancery, which would imply a reasonable level of education, and the relationships he apparently established with several well-known writers including Marlowe, would suggest it too.

On 7 July 1585, writing to Lord Burghley, William Fleetwood mentioned a "Nicholas Skeeres" among a number of "maisterles men & cut-purses, whose practice is to robbe Gentlemen's chambers and Artificers' shoppes in and about London". However, as Charles Nicholl argues, it seems unlikely that such a man would be employed in important government business as this Nicholas Skeres appears to have been a year later.

In April 1593, Skeres was called before the Court of Star Chamber as a witness in the case of Smith vs Wolfall, in which the skinner Wolfall was accused of obtaining money under false pretences. Skeres had lured Smith into Wolfall's clutches, a role he admitted to having undertaken many times before over the past ten or twelve years. Wolfall's victims apparently included Matthew Royden, George Chapman and Thomas Lodge. In fact Skeres's association with loan sharks seems to have even gone back to his early teens, although he claimed that he had only ever done this under duress. A month after this appearance, however, he was engaged in exactly the same activity on behalf of Ingram Frizer, and his gulling of a young man called Drew Woodleff.

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