Having freely risked his life and pledged or parted with nearly all his property in aid of the losing cause, John Hastings was fain at last to make over all his Yelford lands to Speaker Lenthall, and bury himself in the old decayed manor-house at Daylesford. In 1715 Daylesford itself was sold by Samuel Hastings to a Bristol merchant. Samuel's son, then Rector of the parish, had two children, of whom Pynaston, the younger, was only fifteen years old when in 1730 he married Hester Warren, daughter of a gentleman who owned a small estate in Gloucestershire. The young wife died but a few days after the birth of Warren, her second child; and a few weeks or months later Pynaston himself disappeared from Churchill, to seek his fortune elsewhere. The care of his motherless children devolved on their paternal grandfather, whose straitened means ere long drove him to accept a curacy at Churchill. Meanwhile Pynaston's elder brother, Howard, was earning his livelihood as a clerk in His Majesty's Customs.
The rest of the truant widower's life-story is soon told. Within two years he had married again, this time a butcher's daughter. By-and-by he took holy orders, and went out as chaplain to the West Indies, where he ultimately died. Nothing more is known, or perhaps is worth knowing, of the man who begot one of the greatest Englishmen of the eighteenth century. Pynaston served at least as a link in the chain of hereditary causes which helped to foreshape the character of his son. In after years it pleased
