If you are like me, you have shuffled a deck of cards hundreds of times without wondering who the kings are meant to be. I always assumed they were just well-drawn pieces of art, so when I first heard that each one represents a famous ruler from history, I was hooked. I first wrote about it in 2021. Since then I have gone back to the playing-card historians, and the real answer turns out to be more interesting than the one I first gave.
The claim
The story usually says the kings in a deck of cards represent four great rulers:
| Suit | Traditional name | Who he was |
|---|---|---|
| Spades | David | The biblical king of Israel |
| Clubs | Alexander | Alexander the Great, the Macedonian conqueror |
| Hearts | Charles | Charlemagne, founder of the Holy Roman Empire |
| Diamonds | Caesar | Julius Caesar, the Roman dictator |
It is a great story, and the names are real: they really were printed on playing cards. The catch is that they belong to one particular French design, not the ordinary English-pattern deck most of us use in Australia. To find out how much of the claim holds for the cards in your drawer, I went to the International Playing-Card Society (IPCS), a society of playing-card historians and collectors, and tested it one piece at a time.
Names from Paris, not faces
The first part of the story checks out. From the 15th century, French cardmakers gave each court card a name drawn from history or legend, and as Wikipedia’s history of the king card explains, that habit survives today in just one French design, the Paris pattern. It pushed out its French rivals around 1780 and became the country’s official design, and on it the kings are labelled Charles, David, Caesar and Alexander. The queens and jacks got the same treatment, with the IPCS listing queens such as Judith, Pallas and Rachel and jacks such as Hector and Ogier the Dane.
What surprised me is that even these named kings were never portraits. Several of the men lived many centuries before playing cards reached Europe, so there was no likeness for a cardmaker to copy. The identity was carried instead by the printed name and by a few well-chosen props. The IPCS’s comparison of the Paris and Rouen figures describes them: Alexander’s robe is embroidered with a lion, David stands beside a harp, Caesar’s skirt bears the Roman eagle and Charlemagne holds an imperial globe. So even on a French deck, the King of Hearts is a symbol of Charlemagne rather than a picture of him.
The cards in your drawer come from Rouen
This is where the popular version falls apart. The deck you buy at the supermarket in Australia is the English, or International, pattern, the same one used in Britain, the United States and most of the world, and it does not name its court cards at all. The IPCS is blunt about it: the kings, queens and jacks of the English pattern are not thought to represent anyone, have never carried names and probably never portrayed anyone.
The reason is that our cards descend from a different French design. As the IPCS’s history of the court figures explains, a pattern made in Rouen died out in France but was exported to England, where it became the direct ancestor of English and then American cards, and it never supplied names for its court figures. England kept importing cards from Rouen until foreign cards were banned in the early 17th century, after which English makers simply carried on copying the Rouen designs themselves.
There is one tantalising clue left. Take the King of Clubs out of your deck and look at what he is holding: a globe. On the Paris cards, that globe belongs to Charlemagne, and the IPCS reads it as the single original symbol to survive on Anglo-American cards, suggesting our King of Clubs descends from a Charlemagne figure. Not everyone agrees. Some card collectors point out that none of the other English kings carry the props or poses of their Paris counterparts, so the globe could be a coincidence. Either way, it is a small fragment of the old tradition hiding in plain sight.
How an axe became a sword
If the English kings were never meant to be anyone, why do they look so odd? The answer is centuries of copying. The IPCS explains in why the court cards look the way they do that the English design goes back to Rouen cards made before 1516, and that unskilled block makers, particularly in England, gradually distorted the figures, each generation copying the last without knowing what the original artist meant.
The King of Hearts is the famous casualty. He is known as the suicide king because his sword seems to pass through his head, but he originally held an axe, and the IPCS’s suicide king page shows how the axe head gradually disappeared until the shaft looked like a sword. He lost his moustache along the way too. The King of Diamonds, the only king shown in profile, was originally drawn from behind, glancing back over his shoulder. The pose survived the copying, but the meaning behind it did not.
Put it all together, and here is how each king in your deck lines up with his French namesake:
| King in your deck | Paris pattern name | What survives on English cards |
|---|---|---|
| King of Spades | David | Nothing identifiable |
| King of Clubs | Alexander | A globe, which on Paris cards belongs to Charlemagne |
| King of Hearts | Charles (Charlemagne) | A “sword” that was once an axe |
| King of Diamonds | Caesar | A profile pose, originally drawn from behind |
The verdict
It depends on which deck you are holding. On a French Paris-pattern deck, the four kings really are named after David, Alexander, Caesar and Charlemagne, although they were always symbols rather than portraits. On the ordinary English-pattern deck sold in Australia, the kings were never given names and, according to the IPCS, were never meant to be anyone in particular. They descend from unnamed Rouen designs, warped by hundreds of years of copying, with perhaps one survivor from the old tradition: the globe in the King of Clubs’ hand.
I honestly like this answer more than the one I started with. The original claim turned a deck of cards into a tidy history lesson. The real story is messier and better: rival French cardmakers in Paris and Rouen, a trade ban, and generations of craftsmen copying copies until an axe became a sword and a king lost his moustache. Next time you deal a hand, take a closer look at the King of Hearts and you will see it for yourself. Everyday things hide this kind of history surprisingly often; it is the same story behind why Bluetooth is called Bluetooth, and a good reminder to check where a fun fact comes from, as I found with the words Shakespeare supposedly invented.
Sources I checked: the International Playing-Card Society’s pages on who the people on cards are, the court figures, the Paris and Rouen figures, why the court cards look the way they do and the suicide king, plus Wikipedia’s articles on the king card and French-suited playing cards.