After pondering the proposal for some moments, Henry accepted the offer, and a little later handed to Wolsey a sealed packet, urging him to convey it with all speed and not be hindered by anybody. This took place, we are told, at Richmond, at about noon. Then and there the chaplain mounted the horse he had ready, and rode away.
That he must have galloped almost all the way to Dover, changing horses several times, is certain, for he arrived there on the following morning before daylight. By noon on the day after he was at Calais, and at nightfall he personally handed King Henry's sealed dispatch to to the Emperor Maximilian. Having received Maximilian's reply, Wolsey at once mounted a fresh horse that had been saddled for him and set out once more for Calais, which town he reached on the same night, so that by the following evening he was again at Richmond.
The king, however, had already retired to rest, and Wolsey therefore was compelled to wait until the morning to deliver Maximilian's reply. It so happened that he was walking in the park when presently the king overtook him and at once began to upbraid him for his delay in starting for France. Wolsey remained silent and collected until the king had stopped speaking, then, without a word, he produced the despatch that he had brought from Maximilian.
King Henry, we are told, was thereupon “both amazed and delighted,” and with great rapidity the story of the chaplain's remarkable ride to Paris and back again was noised abroad.
Wolsey's reputation for horsemanship was firmly established from that time forward, and Henry, to mark his appreciation of the chaplain's exploit, bestowed upon him the deanery of Lincoln, and not long afterwards made him his almoner. Thus did the man obtain his first step to power who one day was to become the all-powerful Cardinal.
I have not been able to find in any books or documents particulars concerning the horses ridden by Wolsey in that famous journey. From what has been said, however, we may conclude that he rode horses of a stamp very different from the heavy, clumsy animals so plentiful in England at the time, for to have covered so many miles in so few hours the horses must have been of the swiftest, especially when it is remembered that the roads at that period were of the roughest possible description.
In later years, owing partly to his increasing weight, Wolsey almost entirely gave up riding. Yet the interest that he had always taken in horse breeding remained, and though his many and arduous duties occupied much of his leisure he nevertheless found time to devote some of his attention to the rearing of riding and driving horses, and to the breeding of shire horses.
Some of his Eastern sires, indeed—and we know that he had a large stud of them—are said to have been among the most valuable of the breeding stock that until then had ever been known, which may have been the reason that in after years Queen Elizabeth expended such vast sums upon increasing and still further improving the stud that had been Wolsey's.
Elizabeth, however, as we shall presently see, upon the whole took greater interest in “running horses” than in the clumsy shire stallions, and though it is said that she never was actually present at a race meeting held at Newmarket, she is known to have owned a number of race horses the majority of which were stabled near Greenwich and trained chiefly upon Blackheath.