Robert Scarlett was sexton of Peterborough for most of the sixteenth century, and he outlasted nearly everyone. He was born in 1496 and died in 1594, which is remarkable enough, but his fame rests on two funerals.
In 1536 he buried Katharine of Aragon. In 1587 he buried Mary, Queen of Scots. Fifty one years apart, the same man dug the grave.
His portrait hangs above the west door of the cathedral, along with verses in his memory, and he is exactly what you would hope for: a broad, cheerful old man with his spade and his keys. Visitors have been looking up at him for four hundred years. The seventeenth-century writer Thomas Fuller passed on the local theory about how he managed to live so long, which was that a sexton spends his days breathing the good clean earth of consumed bodies, and it evidently agreed with him.
The painting you see today was made in 1665, replacing an earlier one that Parliamentarian soldiers defaced in 1643.
Where: Above the west door inside Peterborough Cathedral.
