King of Hearts: How a 1567 Axe Became the Suicide King

History of Playing Card Illustrations · Updated 16 October 2026

The most famous suicide in any pack was never a suicide. The red monarch with a blade sliding into the back of his skull spent more than two centuries holding an axe, and he wore a moustache.

In the summer of 1902 an early king of hearts came out of the fabric of a Cambridge staircase. The top of that card, the part that would show his weapon, is gone.

The man who kept it was Walter Morley Fletcher, a Trinity College physiologist not yet thirty. Workers were repairing staircase A, the stair up to his rooms in the north-west corner of Great Court, when a small hoard of old pasteboards turned up.

Each was a stiff sandwich of laid paper glued in layers. On one loose backing sheet, ink from a pip had rubbed off and printed itself a second time.

Fletcher treated the find as evidence. He dated it from the staircase itself, finished around 1599, and from the name William Crane, a Trinity man between 1628 and 1635, inscribed on another piece found there.

He gave the lot to the Fitzwilliam Museum in 1907 and wrote it up that year for the Cambridge Antiquarian Society. One batch he dismissed as “Eleven cards of inferior make”.

This piece follows the suicide king from a Rouen workshop to the deck in your kitchen drawer. The short answer to the famous question is a copying slip: woodblock cutters, copying copies, lost the axe head, and the leftover shaft read as a sword.

Below: when it happened, who the court figures were (and were not) meant to be, and what the surviving evidence can and cannot prove.

Nobody designed him this way.

Why does the suicide king stab himself?

Because he lost his axe. The International Playing-Card Society puts it in two sentences: blockmakers copying an older design dropped the axe head, and the shaft that remained looked like a sword driven into his head. Pinning down the date is harder.

“the battle axe seems to have been replaced by a sword”Simon Wintle, founder of The World of Playing Cards, “The Origin of the Suicide King”, wopc.co.uk, 8 November 2013 (updated 29 July 2023)

Note the word “seems”. Wintle founded the site in 1996, and he still hedges the change to around 1800. That hedge is the honest part. There is no single printer, year or pack where the mistake happened. It crept in.

How a woodblock forgets

Early European makers printed from relief blocks cut along the grain of the wood, then coloured the prints by hand or stencil. Grain-cut blocks cannot hold fine lines, the IPCS notes, so the thinnest details suffer first.

Each new block was cut by copying an existing design, and every copy rounded off a little more. An axe blade at the edge of the design is exactly that kind of detail. So is the thin stroke of a moustache.

English packs were also shorter than Rouen ones, so the figures had to be squeezed. On a Cambridge king of diamonds from the 1500s, the museum notes, the suit sign collides awkwardly with the crown because the design is compressed.

Then came the double-ended format in the mid-nineteenth century. Each figure was cut at the waist and mirrored, stranding some details in mid-air. Wintle spotted the oddest result: in the double-ended version, our red monarch is the only court figure with four hands.

The suicide was a copying slip that nobody bothered to correct.Art Murmurs

Who invented playing cards?

No one can be named. “They come from Asia, that’s the one thing that’s rather clear,” the German historian Peter Endebrock told Atlas Obscura in July 2020. A Tang dynasty “leaf game” played in 868 is often cited, though its link to paper packs is disputed.

The clearer ancestor is Mamluk Egypt. A pack identified at the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul has 47 surviving pieces from a full set of 56, in suits of coins, cups, swords and batons.

Its court ranks show no people at all, writes Paul Bostock in a 31 December 2025 study. The faces we now shuffle were drawn in Europe.

Europe’s first references date from the 1370s. By 1380 Barcelona records name Roderic Borges, “pintor y naipero”, a painter and maker of naips, one of the first named craftsmen in the history of playing cards. Around 1480 French makers settled on hearts, spades, diamonds and clubs, the suits that still travel the world.

From Rouen to London: how the English pattern was made

Rouen exporters never set out to invent an English design. They sold their own local French-suited pattern abroad, and it did so well in England that English makers simply adopted it, as Wintle’s Rouen pattern survey explains. The model everyone cites is Pierre Maréchal’s pack of 1567, still held in the Archives départementales de la Seine-Maritime.

England had been trying to keep foreign packs out for a long time. The first documentary evidence of these pasteboards in England is itself a ban on imports, an Act of Edward IV, according to the WOPC history of English playing cards.

On 22 October 1628 Charles I chartered the Worshipful Company of Makers of Playing Cards, partly to control cheap imports.

Rouen goods kept turning up anyway. The British Museum holds a king and queen of spades, 93 by 56 millimetres, hand-coloured woodcut, found behind panelling at Hampton Court Palace and registered in 1936. The museum dates them to the late 1500s and compares them with Maréchal’s work.

Once English cutters were working from imported prints, the drift began.

The IPCS lines up four stages of one design: Maréchal around 1567, an English pack by Bamford around 1750, a Belgian fake of a Hunt pack around 1815 made to dodge the heavy crown tax, and a modern Carta Mundi print. The Belgian forgery, it says, shows the design at its worst.

The table reads like a game of telephone played with knives. Each change on its own is tiny. Over two centuries they add up to figures that no longer make physical sense.

Why does the king of hearts have no moustache?

He had one. The IPCS says plainly that the original design showed a moustache and poor copying lost it, the same way the axe went. He is now the only bare-lipped monarch among the four.

The loss was not even a single event. Ken Lodge, who has collected court figures since about 1945, records a Goodall version from around 1845 in which this figure has heavy sideburns. Later Goodall variants from about 1850 to 1860 drop them. In Victorian London the face was still being redrawn, decade by decade.

Who were the kings meant to be?

On English packs, nobody. The IPCS says the English courts “are not thought to represent anyone” and have never carried names. Snopes rated the popular claim that the four monarchs are Charlemagne, David, Caesar and Alexander as false.

The names are French. Makers there began labelling court figures after epic and historical heroes late in the sixteenth century, and a fixed set had settled by the seventeenth, writes Wintle in his history of court cards. English makers never adopted them. The IPCS thinks the habit may be older still, so the start date stays open.

Here is the twist most pages skip. The Charlemagne link comes from the Paris pattern. English figures descend from Rouen, and in the Rouen naming the hearts monarch was Alexander.

Even in France, the IPCS warns, the figures were never portraits of the people named. Some named heroes, such as Hector of Troy, had no known portrait to copy. We would retire the Charlemagne story altogether. It belongs to a different pattern, and the label was a literary flourish rather than a likeness.

The Elizabeth I legend fails on dates. She was born in 1533, after the courts were designed, and a portrait of Lord Burghley at play shows the familiar jack of hearts already in use during her reign.

The one-eyed jacks

The jack of spades, the jack of hearts and the monarch of diamonds show one eye because the Rouen designers drew them in profile, heads turned back over the shoulder.

It was a pose. Varied stances let a player tell the twelve face cards apart at a glance. A Rouen knave of hearts from the Cambridge hoard, signed with the monogram “NB” for Nicolas Beniere, already faces sideways in profile, on a card dated about 1599 to 1635.

What the Cambridge king cannot tell us

Which brings us back to Fletcher’s staircase. Among his finds is a king of hearts by the same Beniere family, who worked in Rouen from about 1540 to 1650, dated by the museum to around 1599 to 1635. The catalogue entry describes a bearded figure facing front, head turned, right hand holding his robes at the waist.

And then the gap. The head is only partly visible and the left arm not at all, because of major loss in the upper part. So the one early example of this exact figure in a public British collection that we could find cannot show whether he held an axe.

Fletcher even wondered whether the whole group were forgeries trading on the Beniere name. Michael Goodall later suggested workmen lost them mid-game while building the staircase around 1599.

There is a second gap. We could not find a dated first use of the nickname itself. The sources we opened explain the axe, but none says when people started calling him the suicide king, and that matters because the joke only works once the axe is gone.

So the next question is not why he stabs himself. It is when anyone first noticed.

From 1914 Fletcher ran the Medical Research Committee, later the Medical Research Council, and steered its money toward basic science. His king of hearts still sits in storage at the Fitzwilliam, beard still visible, right hand on his robe. The one question everyone asks about him is the one his card can no longer answer.

Where the data comes from: Fitzwilliam Museum records P.15011-R and P.15012-R (Trinity College find, 1902), British Museum record 1936,0731.1-2, IPCS FAQ pages (2006 to 2007), WOPC articles by Simon Wintle, Ken Lodge and Paul Bostock, Atlas Obscura (2020) and Snopes (2007). We opened every linked source in October 2026. A first printed use of the “suicide” nickname could not be found. Diagrams are original schematics.