The Queen of Hearts is a very dangerous ruler. She is the main antagonist in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, known for being a selfish, hot tempered monarch who throws childish tantrums and will sentence people to death with little provocation. Her willingness to have people killed is so prominent that her catchphrase, “Off with his/her head!” is still well known in pop culture 160 years after the book’s publication.

The Queen of Hearts is introduced in the book after Alice watches three playing cards who are painting white roses red. The cards fall to the ground when the queen approaches, so she asks Alice who they are since she can no longer see the front sides of the cards. Alice tells the queen that she doesn’t know, so the Queen of Hearts orders her guards to chop off Alice’s head. Luckily, the king is more even keeled than the queen and reminds her that Alice is just a kid and should be spared.

From there, readers see the strange version of croquet that the Queen of Hearts likes to play. Instead of regular mallets and balls, Wonderland croquet uses flamingoes as mallets and hedgehogs as the balls, and the queen makes her soldiers act as the arches. The problem with the game is that the hedgehogs run away and the flamingoes look up at the players when they try to swing them. The game was further interrupted by the Queen of Hearts’ tendency to shout for people to be executed resulting in the soldier/arches leaving the game to follow her orders.

Fortunately, the king intervened often to pardon people when the queen wasn’t paying attention, and her guards would take people away but did not carry out the orders. By the end of the book, the Queen of Hearts sentences Alice to death again when she defends the Knave of Hearts, but Alice avoids the fate again.