] Linden, I owe you an apology: in asking about Moira I gave you the wrong man and the wrong location- no wonder you found no connection!

Don't apologise: it sent me off in intriguing directions.

] However, this lot comes typed with the book in front of me, and should make better research material.

Thanks for typing it all out. Most interesting. Here are my first thoughts, about names that I know: I'll do some chasing up to produce some second thoughts.

] April 1801, Frank got a big chunk of prize money, and seems to have become a partner in the firm..

Now, that is news to me.

]In November 1801, a certain Charles James also joined the company- Caplan thinks he was involved in the (dubious) selling of commissions. Charles James was a protégé of Lord Moira, and wrote a couple of military books.

Hmm, interesting. I've been trying to chase up information about a man called Charles James for some time, connected with another obsession of mine, Mary Darby Robinson. The subscription list to her 1791 book of poems includes some well-known names, including Earl and Countess Fitzwilliam, as well as Prinny, the Duke of Orleans, the Duchess of Devonshire and Sir Joshua Reynolds. But one name, Charles James Esq., has been puzzling me, because he bought six copies of the book. Why??? (So far I've conjectured that he was either one of her lovers or a bookseller.)

It could be the same man: the subscription list includes a number of military names, such as John Burgoyne, St Leger, and of course her long term lover Banastre Tarleton.

There are a number of other names on that subscription list which feature in your account: to name a few that I've spotted:
-- Right Honourable Lord Rawdon (I think this is one of Moira's incarnations)
-- Right Honourable Lady Charles Spencer
-- The Marquis of Lothian

To do a full comparison would require either lots of work or one of those computer programs that can compare lists. It probably wouldn't mean anything except to show that both Mary Robinson and Henry Austen had connections with the same aristocratic circle.

I still haven't been able to find whether there's a connection between Warren Hastings and Moira, future Marquis of Hastings.

Oh, finding these things out would be so much easier if everyone was called odd names like Banastre and Maunde rather than Knight and Hall. And if noblemen hadn't kept changing their names all the time!