On the morning of Monday, 21 February 1814, a uniformed man calling himself Colonel du Bourg and claiming to be aide-de-camp to Lord Cathcart, arrived at the Ship Inn at Dover, England, bearing news that Napoleon I of France had been killed and Bourbon rule restored.
Eight people were eventually convicted of conspiracy to defraud, including Lord Cochrane, a Radical member of Parliament and well-known naval hero, his uncle the Hon.
Andrew Cochrane-Johnstone, Richard Butt, Lord Cochrane's financial advisor, and Captain Random de Berenger, who had posed both as du Bourg and as one of the French officers.
Lord Cochrane continued to petition the government for redress; in 1832, he was granted a free pardon, including reinstatement to his rank of Rear Admiral.
Restoration of the Order of the Bath and other honours followed in the subsequent decades, and, in 1877, a Select committee found that his treatment since 1832 constituted "nothing less than a public recognition by those Governments of his innocence."
Security speculation based on allegedly accurate news delivered by semaphore telegraph forms a plot event in the novel The Count of Monte Cristo (published 1844).
The Great Stock Exchange Fraud is a key plot element in Katherine Cowley's The True Confessions of a London Spy (published 2022).