Queen of Hearts

The Queen of Hearts is the official title of the reigning monarch of The United Kingdom of Wonderland. First established during the Second Interregnum, this hereditary title has been passed down from mother to daughter ever since.

Roles & Responsibilities

Since the creation of the title, the Queen of Hearts’ primary responsibility has been to determine whose heads shall be removed from their bodies for offenses against the crown. Though in recent years the Queen’s consort, the so-called “King” of Hearts, has taken to pardoning nearly all offenders—a sensible move, given the Queen’s predilection for shouting “off with his/her/their” head at nearly anyone who tries her patience—a pronouncement of guilt in the early days of the United Kingdom was nearly always followed by a swift beheading.

Beyond determining who shall be beheaded, the Queen is also responsible for determining the method by which the condemned will be separated from their noggin. The axe and the sword are the easiest implements to come by, but many Queens—including the first—grew suddenly patient when presented with the opportunity to march the condemned to the kingdom’s only guillotine in far-off Yesterland.

Other roles and responsibilities include the appointment of regional governors, resolving disputes between the constituent states of the kingdom, and the refereeing of the Queen’s Cup Final—the culminating event of the Wonderland Croquet season.

Most Queens take this last responsiblity quite seriously, some of them even more seriously than they take their role in the nation’s beheadings.

Succession

Succession is a complicated affair, given the fact that the population of Wonderland drops to zero at the end of each Interregnum. As a result, a DNA sample from founding Queen Frieda Jacobs is kept in the Grand Vault of The Garden—the second-most secure branch of The First Imperial Bank of Oz. At the start of each new Interregnum, claimants to the Wonderlandian throne submit their DNA for analysis. The person with the highest percentage of Jacobs’ DNA in their blood is thereafter awarded the crown.

If there is a need for a second queen during a given Interregnum, the crown is passed down according to the rules of matrilineal primogeniture. The eldest female child in the line inherits the throne. No male descendants are ever knowingly considered.

Origin

Late in the Second Interregnum, Frieda Jacobs united the various southern kingdoms of Eden as part of the War of Western Aggression. A charismatic leader who had survived an assassination attempt by the neighboring Ninth Empire of Oz, Jacobs had no trouble in raising an army to defend the southern kingdoms. And after the war, when word spread of Jacobs’ supposed descent from all seven of the south’s legendary woodland princesses, popular support swelled for a united kingdom with Jacobs at its head.