The students were on their way to the refectory, and the youthful heir appeared more concerned over the prospect of a good dinner than the result of the case upon which his future depended.
Stories of the Claimant were countless as he strode like a Colossus through the country in the long interval between his civil case and the criminal trial that succeeded it.
He was mobbed by sympathisers everywhere, and men and women shook hands with him, as if it bestowed a distinction on themselves. There was one amusing story at the time of a wealthy Yorkshire manufacturer whose wife said to him when they entertained the Claimant to dinner:
“John, how we are slithering into Society!”
After he had served eleven years’ imprisonment, his sentence having been reduced through good conduct, the Claimant came to the Exhibition to learn if he could be of any further service to us, or we to him. His ponderous bulk was so much reduced by prison fare that we should not have known him. He said he was none the worse for the period of enforced “banting,” which reduced his weight without injuring his health.
The Claimant gave me several sittings at this time, and a new model was substituted for the old one. He spoke freely of his prison experiences, and said:
“It was not easy to be philosophical when set to tease oakum, but eventually I bowed to my fate cheerfully enough. It is some consolation to know that thousands still believe in the justice of my claim to the Tichborne estates.”
Notwithstanding this, the Claimant published in a Sunday newspaper his signed confession, which he is said to have afterwards recanted.
He survived his liberation from prison fourteen years, and, gradually sinking into poverty, died in obscure lodgings in Marylebone, not far from the Exhibition, on the 2nd of April, 1898. The name engraved on his coffin was “Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne,” thus maintaining his claim to the very last.