Leicester Abbey - Post-Reformation

Post-Reformation

The canons regular in fact supported the Oath of Supremacy of the King, and the abbey would have become the cathedral of Leicester. However, it had problems of its own, far from the reaches of spiritual politics. The Abbey was in debt. The canons owed £411 10 s 0 d (£411.50). The last abbot, John Bourchen, surrendered the abbey to Thomas Cromwell, Wolsey’s old secretary. He set up what was believed to be a scheme to save the Abbey (despite his firm belief in the dissolution of the monasteries)—the sale of the abbey’s land and possessions. The scheme (unsurprisingly) failed. The canons disbanded, and the land was granted to the Marquess of Northampton, who later sold it to the Earl of Huntingdon, who built a house in the grounds of the abbey, using the Abbey's stone. The Abbey's main gatehouse, which gave access to the cloister that flanked the abbey church, some boundary walls and later farm buildings have survived.

In 1613, William Cavendish, the first Earl of Devonshire, acquired the property, and it became known as Cavendish House. It was used as the headquarters of Charles I after his forces occupied the town in late May 1645, shortly before the Battle of Naseby. The house was burnt down following the royalist defeat at Naseby (though it is unclear who set fire to it) and never re-built.

In 1931 the precinct of the abbey was incorporated into the Victorian park called Abbey Park, which had previously been confined to the area between the river and the canal. All of the former mediaeval abbey precinct is now a Scheduled monument. The scheduled area includes not only the footprint of the abbey church and the main abbey buildings (The outline of which was set out in stone once it had been identified in the 1920s) the older parts of the precinct wall which are in stone and line the northern, north-eastern and north-western sides of the precinct, and the brick part the precinct wall, known as Abbot Penny's Wall (which was erected around a southern extension to the precinct c.1500) and the remains of Cavendish House.