Edward VII Liked Prostitutes So Much, He Had a Private Suite Built in His Favorite Whorehouse
Albert Edward (1841 – 1910), who went on to reign as King Edward VII of the United Kingdom from 1901 until his death, was mediocre as both a man and as a monarch. However, as a libertine and all around royal party animal, Edward VII shone, standing in stark contrast to his notoriously straitlaced mother, Queen Victoria, whose name became synonymous with prudery and uptightness.
From early on, Prince Albert, or “Bertie”, was a disappointment to his prim and proper parents, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg. At age 16, while observing army maneuvers, Bertie had his first scandal, with a prostitute. It was hushed up, but the queen was not amused, and Bertie’s father, although ill, went to see and reprimand his reprobate son. On the way back home from chastising Bertie, his father caught pneumonia, which did him in. For the next four decades, Queen Victoria blamed Bertie for killing her beloved husband. She decided that he was unfit to reign, and tried to keep him from following her on the throne. The queen even tried to get an Act of Parliament passed to remove Bertie from the line of succession, but was thwarted.
While Queen Victoria failed in her attempts to remove Bertie from the line of succession, she did her best to keep him from ever wearing the crown. She often remarked that her longevity and long reign were due to her determination to outlive Bertie and prevent him from ever becoming king. She tried hard and did her best, but after a 64 year reign, the old girl finally gave up the ghost and died in 1901. After a long wait that he thought would never end, Bertie finally became king at age 60.
During that decades long wait to succeed his disapproving mother, Bertie became notorious for his relentless quest to gratify his erotic appetites. He had a particular fondness for prostitutes, but he was willing to sample anything and anybody, whether cheap hookers or top notch French aristocratic ladies and courtesans. From discrete liaisons, to well publicized affairs with famous actresses, to wife-swapping orgies, Bertie was insatiable and down for anything.
He was a particularly big fan of Paris’ elite brothels, especially its most exclusive whorehouse, La Chabanais. So infatuated was he with that establishment’s prostitutes, that he built himself an exclusive and private royal room in La Chabanais, decorated with his coat of arms and furnished to his specific tastes. Said tastes included a specially designed chair, named siege d’amour, which he had installed in his whorehouse room. By the 1890s, Bertie was fat, middle-aged, and out of shape, so he had the heavy duty love chair custom made to enable him to have intercourse without crushing his partners. The specialty chair also enabled him to position the prostitutes just right for royal access, with minimal exertion and contortions on his part.