in which Gore stated that Cooper had arrived on his ship, asked to be reinstated as secretary which was refused, and was put ashore without further delay. Notwithstanding this true version of events, Cooper did indeed manage to convince the Austrians that he was the newly appointed Consul and evidence for this is provided by a letter written by John FitzGibbon, 2nd Earl of Clare (1792-1851) to an unknown recipient from Whitehall on 25 April (1827): "My Dear Lord, Will you meet me for a few minutes today or tomorrow. I wish to speak to you on the subject of an unfortunate man who has written to me from Newgate with whose case I am not acquainted. His name is Cooper and I knew him when he was Consul at Venice. Yours faithfully Clare." The concluding pages of Cooper's petition relate the history of his dealings with British and foreign representatives as Consul in Venice and later as Consul in Ragusa, Sicily, but there is no independent evidence as to the veracity of these claims. He finishes by stating that, in the summer of 1817, he and "his family" were forced to flee from Ragusa due to the plague. In November 1825, a notice appeared in The Times newspaper inserted by a John Powell asking for help to locate a Captain Thomas Cole RN, who had been living at a hotel in Dublin for six months, having married a daughter of "a respectable family". The notice states that after promising his wife and sister-in-law that they were going to his home in Yorkshire, he had crossed the Irish Sea and travelled by "post with four horses" to Birkenhead, where he had left them and was never seen again. Captain Thomas Cole was in fact an alias of Lancelot Cooper, as revealed in an 1827 article in The Times which dealt with Cooper's misdemeanor. It is not known where Cooper had spent the intervening years but it could have been in the US, as an American passport in the name of Allison was found on him when he was arrested. When Cooper returned to Great Britain, he embarked on a life of crime, forging cheques under a number of aliases by ingratiating himself with families and businesses. One unfortunate family were the Powells: William Powell (a relative of John ) wrote to the Home Secretary in May 1827 begging that Cooper