At this time Belgium was annexed to France, and Bauwens proposed to the Directoire that he should endeavour to obtain the secret of the machines by which the British manufacturer bade defiance to his continental rivals. The French Government promised him their support, and he came to Manchester for the purpose of getting the necessary information. This was in 1798, and he was aided by François de Pauw, one of his relations. At Manchester he made the acquaintance of an overseer, Mr. James Kenyon, and his daughter Mary. Whilst talking business with the father he appears to have talked of other matters to the girl, who eventually became his wife. The various parts of the machine, which in Belgium came to be called the “mull jenny,” were secreted in casks of sugar and in bags of coffee, and shipped to Hamburg. The statement that he intended to add dealings in colonial produce to his tanning operations was a sufficient explanation of this novel step on his part. Some of the packages were to be sent from Gravesend, and from this port Bauwens intended himself to depart, along with a number of workmen whom he had engaged. An overseer named Harding had a wife who strongly objected to the departure of her husband, and she made a scene, in which the destination and intentions of the party were made known. The police thus came to a knowledge of the conspiracy, and the men were arrested. Bauwens managed to escape in the crowd, and hastening quickly to London, he took passage to Hamburg, where part of the precious packages and the workmen who had been sent on before awaited him. Here he had a narrow escape, for Sir James Crawford, the British Envoy, endeavoured to have him imprisoned. The export of machinery and workmen was then a criminal offence, and the conspirators who had fallen into the hands of the authorities were brought before the Court of King’s Bench and convicted. The contemporary accounts of the affair in the English periodicals are very meagre, and the French accounts have an air of exaggeration. Thus we are told that Bauwens was, in his absence, condemned to death, and _faute de mieux_ hung in effigy. Whatever his sentence may have been, it was powerless to hinder his success. He established spinning factories at Ghent, and still larger establishments at Paris, where he converted a convent of Bonshommes, at Passy, into a cotton spinning mill. He had a tannery at St. Cloud; he bought from the French Government the ingots made from the silver taken in the dissolved monasteries, and sold them at considerable profit to the Bank of Amsterdam.