Royal Wrangling: Queen Elizabeth's 'Guilty Conscience' Revealed in Secret Heart-to-Heart With American Cowboy Monty Roberts

Famous California horse whisperer Monty Roberts, 89, shared a decades-long friendship with the late Queen Elizabeth II, which is explored in the documentary The Cowboy and the Queen.

Her Majesty, who first met the horse trainer in 1989, even confided in him about her "guilty conscience" regarding the ways she trained her horses.

"My wife and I have been married for 68 years, but horses are my second love," the American cowboy told Fox News. "Her Majesty and I shared a deep love for horses. And getting to know her was such a wonderful time in my life."

Roberts has long been praised for his nonviolent approach to equine training methods, which caught Elizabeth II's eye in the last year of the 1980s.

He added, "I was strictly with horses. I didn’t go into the people thing at that point in time. And some trainers of racehorses here in California came to me, and they said, 'Oh my G--, this is the way we've got to go. This is better than [what] we do with all the beating and the tying down and the roping of the front feet and all of that stuff.'"

Roberts continued, "… So we had three or four open houses here for the trainers of California racehorses. There were magazine writers here just to see what was going on. And they wrote their stories… The Queen was receiving those magazines, and she read about this crazy thing called nonviolent training."

After sending her horse manager to California to meet with Roberts and watch his methods in action, Her Majesty was impressed with what her aide told her. The monarch promptly arranged for the horse whisperer to meet with her at Windsor Castle.

"He came, and he watched me," the trainer stated. "He said, 'I want to see another one, I want to see another one.' I did about four horses for him. He went back [to the U.K.] and told her, 'It’s for real.' And she said, 'I want him over here.'"

"I was to be there five days," Roberts shared. "He had 23 horses in pastures in front of her bedroom, and she could see if anybody was messing with those horses, cheating in any way. She had people there guarding these horses… She brought one horse that she had given to her mother that never had a saddle, never had a rider on its back… Twenty-six minutes later, I had a rider on and a saddle on its back."

He concluded by observing how the Queen was "in a daze" after witnessing the methods. "She said, 'I have such a guilty conscience. I should have told my father I wanted to… [learn] nonviolent ways to train horses. And now I know it’s possible.' We became close friends from that point onward with the horses being the thing that brought us together."