The show’s host, Tracy Borman, author of The Private Lives of the Tudors, explained the chair to website Jezebel, and you might want to get out your smelling salts.
Revealing the idea for the device was likely developed after the royal visited some of Paris’ finest brothels, she says the British royal loved sex holidays in the much more socially liberal French capital.
‘There is a theory that this sex chair, as well as being just a bit kinky, frankly, was to sort of help him do the business, even though he was now quite large,’ Bormon told the website. ‘The way in which it is structured has enabled him to remain standing and to access the lady on the chair, should we say, without his enormous belly getting in the way.’
The functionality of the bizarre contraption has never been entirely deciphered, leading to various theories as to how it actually worked.
‘What really perturbed me about the chair is that there was room on it for two ladies, one on the top and one underneath—but exactly how he got to the one underneath we never managed to actually work out between the whole crew.
‘So, what she was doing down there, whether it was like a queuing system, she was just lying down there to wait, I don’t know.’
However it worked, Borman says Bertie ‘truly loved’ the bizarre sex toy.
What the current monarch thinks of this piece of history returning to the spotlight remains unknown, but we suspect Her Majesty might not be amused.