TENCH, Fisher (?1673-1736), of Low Leyton, Essex.

Tench inherited an estate at Low Leyton in Essex, where he built himself a fine house designed by Inigo Jones and decorated by Sir James Thornhill. Returned unopposed for Southwark as a Whig in 1715, and created a baronet by George I six months later, he voted for the septennial bill in 1716 but against the Government on Lord Cadogan in 1717. As a director of the South Sea Company he defended the response of the Company in May 1717 to Walpole’s scheme for reducing the interest on the national debt. On 22 Jan. 1719 he applied to James Craggs for lottery tickets, explaining that

I ask not one for myself but for the principal persons in my borough, who as they were hearty friends to me on my election, so are now the most zealous for the present establishment.Stowe 246, f.210.

In that year he voted for the repeal of the Occasional Conformity and Schism Acts and the peerage bill. He was defeated for Southwark in 1722, and again at a by-election in 1724.

In 1725, Tench was appointed one of the managers of the Charitable Corporation,See BOND, Denis, and SUTTON, Sir Robert. of which his second son, William, became cashier. When in 1732 Samuel Sandys, the chairman of the select committee set up to investigate the Corporation’s affairs, ‘passed over’ Tench as ‘not justly to be censured’, the 1st Lord Egmont remarked that although Tench left the Corporation when he found evidence of irregularities he ‘suffered his son to remain cashier till his death [in 1731] who was guilty of frauds’, and that he must have known ‘of his son’s roguery, because he affirmed in a gentleman’s hearing that his son’s employment as cashier was worth him £600 a year, though his salary was but £150; and further that Robinson [George] gave his son £100 a year, which could not be but that he might abet Robinson in his rogueries’.HMC Egmont Diary i. 270.He did not stand again, and died 31 Oct. 1736.