[3] After being educated at St Paul's School, London under Thomas Gale, he was admitted a scholar of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, on 19 February 1691.
[1][4] Tenison was at first intended for law, and was bound apprentice to his uncle, Charles Mileham, an attorney at Great Yarmouth.
On 24 March 1705 he was made a prebendary of Lichfield Cathedral, resigning in 1708 on being appointed archdeacon of Carmarthen, in favour of George Fage, a relation and fellow-student at Corpus.
[1][5] A Whig supporter, in the minority in Kent in a bitterly contested election, he reported on the derision those in his position endured.
[6] The memory of the Kentish Petition of 1701 endured, with David Polhill who had been a petitioner standing for election in 1710; and Tenison wrote to him in October of that year about it.
[1][5] The surveyor involved in estimating the dilapidations of the episcopal palaces was John James, who defended himself in print against what he called Tenison's "cavils and misrepresentations".
The claim was referred to Peter King, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and John Bettesworth, Dean of the Arches, as arbitrators, with the Bishop of Lichfield as moderator.
[11] The Three Discourses of the Swiss theologian Samuel Werenfels, translated by Herne, were an intervention in the controversy on Hoadly's side, and were addressed to Tenison.
[13] There are surviving notes in his handwriting on parishes in the diocese of St Davids where he was given a power of deputy, between the bishops George Bull and Philip Bisse.
[15] Tenison introduced a Bill of Residence in the Irish Parliament in December 1731, and became a literary target for Jonathan Swift.