Kitley Heritage - Bastard quartering Pollexfen impaling Worseley

20/ Or a chevron azure Quartering 1 & 4 Argent a lion rampant gules 2 & 3 Azure Impaling Argent a chief gules – Bastard quartering Pollexfen impaling Worseley

William Bastard of Kitley, son and heir of Pollexfen Bastard (q.v. shield 19), baptised at Yealmpton on 5th Sept 1727, married Anne, daughter of Thomas Worseley of Hovingham, York. In 1779 William Bastard saved the Plymouth dockyard and arsenal when the city was threatened by the approach of the French fleet. This caused great alarm amongst the inhabitants because of the large number of French POW’s confined there and, as no troops could be spared from the Plymouth Garrison for the purpose, William Bastard force-marched the POWs to Exeter assisted only by the local peasantry and some of the gentry of the district. For his actions he was gazetted to the Baronetcy, a title which, however, was never assumed, and therefore could not be claimed, or borne, by any of his descendants.

At first it seems odd that all of the shields of the later generations of the Bastards shown on this side of the Kitley hallway simply record the Bastard impalement, and there are none which show the ancestry of the other lines of any further Bastard marriages – the multiple quartering depicted in shield 25 excepted. Upon reflection, however, it was probably the intention that the display of arms should concentrate almost exclusively on the Devon & Cornish ancestry of the Bastards, which indeed it does, and it should be noted that all but one (q.v. shield 23) of the marriages of later generations were into families whose own ancestry lay outside the West Country (q.v. shields 21 & 22).