Queen Elizabeth II bet big on horse trainer Monty Roberts when she invited him to Windsor Castle in 1989 to saddle 23 of the royal family’s young horses.
The odds were against him.
Critics had dismissed the Salinas, Calif.-native’s gentle horse training method, of using body language over force.
They had even accused him of drugging horses into submission.
Roberts was nearly shaking in his cowboy boots at the sight of the first two massive, unbroken, horses.
“You can train a horse without using any force at all,” Roberts, now 89, told the Post.
In 22 minutes, the first horse was saddled and ridden.
The second, in just 19 minutes.
“Queen Elizabeth’s mother came up to me with tears in her eyes. She said that was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” Roberts recalled.
“It was the most fantastic opportunity any horseman could ever want.”
That moment sparked Roberts’ unlikely friendship with the late Queen Elizabeth II, chronicled in a new documentary, “The Cowboy and The Queen,” which premieres Thursday as part of the Doc NYC festival.
In it, Roberts details his life story, beginning with his own physically abusive upbringing that inspired him to find a way to use body language, not violent discipline, to relax and build trust with horses.
“People who have gone through trauma themselves often can’t shake it and perpetuate the trauma and Monty was really able to be a disruptor not only in his own life but in the world. I found that to be an admirable story worth telling,” director Andrea Nevins told The Post.
Roberts became a Hollywood horse trainer in the 1950s working with the likes of James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor.
He also began using his humane horse training techniques on people suffering from post-traumatic stress, something Queen Elizabeth II was especially passionate about championing, he said.
“I helped her [Queen Elizabeth II] learn how to read that personality that horses have and do the things that cause them to be friendly with you and not a flight animal,” Roberts told The Post.
“You cannot fool a horse. She believed me and my God, I would take a bullet before I would deceive her in any way.”
Roberts was invited to the stables at Windsor in 1989, where he demonstrated cutting, the rodeo sport of a rider isolating cattle from the herd to Queen Elizabeth II.
“I wore my cowboy hat to ride the cattle back and forth, and every time I spoke with the queen I took off the cowboy hat,” he said.
“By the third or fourth time she said, ‘Monty, not all men have to take off their hats when they’re speaking with the queen. I don’t want you to take it off – do you see all these military men around to protect me? They don’t take off their hats when they’re in a uniform.’
“Queen Elizabeth II tapped my shoulder and said, ‘I dub this your uniform.’ I had chaps on, Wrangler jeans, a cowboy hat and a cowboy shirt, and a scarf. That was my royal uniform.”
A few weeks later, Roberts gave the queen the name of British trainer Terry Pendry when she phoned asking who his recommendation was for her stables, and he was hired shortly after, the New York Times reported.
He became her long-term riding companion.
She also encouraged Roberts to write his book, “The Man Who Listens to Horses,” and connected him to a publisher.
By 1996, she sent him preaching his method on a tour all over England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, where he worked with 98 horses in 30 days.
“She said, ‘I want you to go to every country possible. I want the world to know what you’re doing.”
The queen had discovered her love of horses as a young princess when she learned to ride a Shetland pony, called Peggy, when she was 4.
The longest-reigning British monarch, who died last September at 96, had her own breeding and racing stock she inherited from her father, King George VI, and in the course of her life, owned hundreds of horses.
In 1983 she went horseback riding with President Ronald Reagan in Rancho Del Cielo during her 10-day tour of the West Coast.
And up until 1986, she rode on horseback during the annual Trooping the Colour ceremony in London.
She continued riding well into her 90s around the grounds of Windsor Castle and her Scottish estate of Balmoral.
The late monarch even incorporated horses in her 96th birthday celebration posing between her Fell ponies.
Roberts shared hundreds of phone calls with Queen Elizabeth II over the years — fondly recalling a time when she left a meeting to answer one of his calls.
“About 16 years or so I called and said, ‘It’s Monty Roberts. I’d like to speak to the queen. They said, ‘One moment please – the queen is stuck in a meeting with the political people of Northern Ireland.’
“I said I’ll call back tomorrow afternoon and about that time I heard, ‘Monty how are you?’ I said, ‘Your Majesty, they told me you’re in a meeting – and she said, ‘I am in a meeting in Northern Ireland and was hoping for a way to get out of that meeting so now I’m in another room talking to you,’” he told The Post.
“That was as close as I ever came to missing a call from her in 33 years.”
Queen Elizabeth II even relied on Roberts to train a disobedient royal corgi — ironically the one she named Monty.
“He was one of the most difficult ones. I trained him by the same method. They were forcing him to do things and he had a mind of his own. When we finally got him right he appeared with her in the ‘James Bond” ‘film,” Roberts said.
The queen and her pack of corgis appeared alongside Bond, played by Daniel Craig, in a short film for the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics.
Roberts also recalls being in the room when Queen Elizabeth would be on calls with world leaders.
“She did most of her work in the backroom with the politicians of England and we think that she doesn’t really give them much in the way of direction but she gets a lot of the credit.
“I’m here to tell you that she is responsible for the good things that happened. I sat beside her when she told politicians that they were dead wrong in what they were doing and they changed it. Often it had to do with education and relationships with other countries around them,” Roberts said.
Roberts recalled telling his friend how he used his techniques to help veterans and people suffering from post-traumatic stress using similar methods to how he trained horses, telling her: “I believe my concepts can go from horses to help people too.”
Today, he provides free workshops using equine-assisted techniques to treat veterans suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) at his Flag Is Up Farms in Santa Barbara.
Weeks before her death the friends had a final, poignant conversation.
“She was on the phone and she was talking about this dreadful problem that she had that the doctors were working on at the time. It was to say goodbye. She thought she was going and she did go,” Roberts said.
“It was heartbreaking for me to listen to that. One of the things she said to me was, ‘If there’s a meeting of everybody and I’m not around and I’m gone, I don’t want you to cry’ – and I said I won’t. And then she died.”
Roberts and his wife, Pat Roberts were invited to the funeral at Westminster Abbey.
“I kept remembering that the queen said ‘Don’t cry.’ So I’m not going to cry. We stand up and I’m looking straight forward in a brand new black suit and they stop the casket directly in front of me,” he said.
“I can reach out and touch it – water started running down my eyes as if I had two faucets. I had to sit down and I felt like I heard the queen say, ‘it’s okay, go ahead and sit down.’”