Several years afterwards, when he went with Edward into France, no less than two lords, nine knights, fifty-eight squires, and twenty gentlemen joined his train .-- Dugdale: Baronage, p.583.Sharon Turner: History of England, vol.iii.p.

380.] But in that day a certain mixture of vice was necessary to success; and Hastings wounded no self-love by the assumption of unfashionable purism.
He was regarded with small favour by the queen, who knew him as the companion of Edward in his pleasures, and at a later period accused him of enticing her faithless lord into unworthy affections.

And certain it is, that he was foremost amongst the courtiers in those adventures which we call the excesses of gayety and folly, though too often leading to Solomon's wisdom and his sadness.

But profligacy with Hastings had the excuse of ardent passions: he had loved deeply, and unhappily, in his earlier youth, and he gave in to the dissipation of the time with the restless eagerness common to strong and active natures when the heart is not at ease; and under all the light fascination of his converse; or the dissipation of his life, lurked the melancholic temperament of a man worthy of nobler things.

Nor was the courtly vice of the libertine the only drawback to the virtuous character assigned to Hastings by Comines.
His experience of men had taught him something of the disdain of the cynic, and he scrupled not at serving his pleasures or his ambition by means which his loftier nature could not excuse to his clear sense.
[See Comines, book vi., for a curious anecdote of what Mr.Sharon Turner happily calls "the moral coquetry" of Hastings,--an anecdote which reveals much of his character.] Still, however, the world, which had deteriorated, could not harden him.