JENYNS, John (1659-1717), of Hayes, Mdx.

Jenyns’s father, who bought the manor of Hayes in 16771Lysons, Environs of London, ii. 590. and also owned an estate in the Isle of Ely,2Lysons, Cambs. 29, which confuses Roger Jenyns with his son and namesake. was the grandson of Sir John Jenyns, or Jennings, of Sandridge, Hertfordshire, and the first cousin of the Jennings sisters, Frances, Duchess of Tyrconnel, and Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. He was an original member of the corporation set up by Act of Parliament in 1663 to drain the fens, serving successively as conservator, bailiff, and surveyor general of fens till his death in 1693.

Jenyns himself was elected to the Fen Corporation as conservator at the age of 25, succeeding on his father’s death to the surveyor generalship, which he held for twenty years.3W. M. Palmer, ’Fen Office Docs.’, Camb. Antiq. Soc. Proc. xxxviii. 96. Though returned as a Tory for Cambridgeshire, he voted against the French commercial treaty in 1713 and Steele’s expulsion in 1714. Classed at George I’s accession as a Tory who might often vote Whig, he voted against the septennial bill in 1716, dying 1 Feb. 1717.