Hinson’s inheritance from his father, a prosperous yeoman farmer, amounted to just £16, a featherbed and share of his elder brother’s future barley crops. Accordingly, it was imperative that he make his own fortune, and in 1576 he abandoned a moderately successful academic career to enter the service of one of his pupils, the young 3rd earl of Bath. The peer was a kinsman of Hinson’s wife, but it is not known which relationship came first. As the earl’s surveyor and receiver-general he assumed a central role in his household at Tawstock, and in 1581 obtained from him a lease of the nearby Parkgate estate. He was also elected to three Elizabethan parliaments as a Barnstaple Member on Bath’s interest. However, Hinson came to be viewed locally as exercising too strong a hold over his impressionable employer. In 1591 he was briefly imprisoned in the Fleet in London, after assorted Devon gentlemen complained to the Privy Council that he had abused his position as executor to Bath’s mother and stirred up trouble between the earl and countess. Although he gave good service to the government ten years later by helping to supervise the shipping of troops from Barnstaple to Ireland, allegations of misconduct continued to be levelled at him in Devon, not least by his avowed enemy, John Delbridge*.
In 1604 Hinson was returned for Barnstaple for the fourth time, once again as the earl’s nominee. He left no mark on the first three sessions of this Parliament, though he presumably took an interest in a bill introduced in the Lords in March 1606, to permit the transporting of timber down the River Taw. This measure was fiercely opposed by Bath, whose fishing rights were likely to be affected, and Hinson may well have helped to mobilize opposition at Westminster prior to the bill’s rejection.
Hinson missed part of the fourth parliamentary session, but he had acquired a powerful ally in the form of Henry Howard, 1st earl of Northampton, who wrote to the Speaker on 14 Mar. 1610 to excuse his absence. As he was nominated on 25 June to help consider a bill to improve the supply of timber in Devon for the Navy, he had presumably returned to the House by then. Nothing is recorded of his activities during the fifth session, when the Great Contract negotiations were finally abandoned. However, Northampton wrote to him in February 1611, acknowledging receipt of a birthday gift, and complaining that Members’ ‘reserved dealings at the breaking up’ of the Parliament had rendered management of the Crown’s finances considerably more difficult.
By the end of his life, Hinson had acquired both an estate at Coveney, in the Isle of Ely, and, thanks to Bath, property in Gloucestershire, where several of his children settled.