And I recently heard a snippet of something that caught my attention – that Elizabeth of York, that quiet, unassuming consort of Henry VII, was perhaps the inspiration for the image of the Queen of Hearts in the deck of cards.
Take a look at this very famous portrait of her:
And compare it against the Queen of Hearts playing card:
Pretty similar, no? Both holding a flower, similar headdresses. The legend goes that Elizabeth loved card games, and after her sad death in childbirth – attempting to have a “spare” to young Henry Tudor who was now heir after the death of Arthur the year before – Henry VII decided to ensure that she would be a part of the card games forever.
Elizabeth definitely loved gambling, and card games. Card games themselves date back to ancient times, but during the middle ages people generally played with what we might today consider Tarot cards. The modern suits we know with hearts, spades, and so on, came from France. They first became popular in England around 1480.
Paintings like this suddenly became a thing:
It’s hard to know for sure what the earliest playing cards looked like. The Puritans destroyed nearly all of them when they were in control. And they’ve left us with barely a dozen sets from the Tudor period. But here is one set that gives us an idea:
So that brings us back to dear Elizabeth. Was she really the inspiration for the Queen of Hearts? Well, in France – who were the inspiration for the English styles, each face card already had a real life person on whom it was based. The Queen of Hearts represented the Biblical Judith, and the King of Hearts was Charlemagne.
The short answer is: Probably not.
But it’s still a lovely sentiment to think about.
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Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast,  one of the longest running indie history podcasts, going since 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. She writes books, created the original Tudor Planner (a yearly diary filled with Tudor history) and in 2019 created the world's first Tudorcon (you can "attend" online this year!). She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 20 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history.