Duty Aces
In this blog post, I’m sharing three new card tricks today that combine into a single unified card set called “Duty Aces”. Here are some more details on the individual tricks:
- “Imitation Aces” - Four duplicate Aces of Spades are displayed. One is genuine, and three are “counterfeit”. The three “fake” Aces transform, one at a time, into the Aces of Diamonds, Hearts and Clubs, leaving you with four regular Aces. ♠️
- “Traditional Twist” - A relaxed, table-based handling of Dai Vernon’s classic packet trick, “Twisting the Aces”. 🌀
- “Death and Taxes” - A humorous take on “The Last Trick of Dr. Jacob Daley” featuring a Victorian cartomancy presentation. 💀💰
The presentation for each was inspired by the remarkable history of the Ace of Spades and its surprising connection to the British tax and legal systems. Keep reading to learn more.
Dressed Up Like the Ace of Spades ♠️
There is an old French idiom, “Fagoté comme l’as de pique”, which, when translated into English, means “dressed up like the Ace of Spades”. To my ear, this odd expression sounds like a good thing—a compliment, even. That you’re dressed smartly, just like the fanciest Ace in the pack. Surprisingly, it actually means the opposite: that a person is badly, shabbily or oddly dressed. It can also indicate that a person looks dishevelled, is wearing a slapdash, thrown-together outfit, or that their clothes don’t match or fit properly.
Fagoté comme l’as de pique
The phrase is very old. It appears in the 17th century in the writings of Scarron and Molière (both influential writers during the golden age of French comedy). While its meaning is settled, the origin of the “as de pique” half of the expression is anything but. Several competing theories exist, and much of what is said about its origins is likely a form of folk myth propagated by online chatter. Consequently, the theories that follow are best taken with a large pinch of salt.🧂
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| From the Forest by Mykola Pymonenko. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons. |
The most widely accepted part is “fagoté”. It’s derived from the French word fagoter, meaning to tie up a fagot, or bundle of sticks. Bind the bundle badly, and the twigs jut out at all angles, much like a person haphazardly dressed, with an upturned collar and untucked shirt. Fittingly, fagoter is still used in France to describe dressing someone in a way that lacks style or good taste.
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| A French Ace of Spades from 1813. Image Credit: Bibliothèque nationale de France via Gallica. |
The “as de pique” half is much murkier. In the 17th century, it described someone stupid, ridiculous or badly put together; nowadays it leans more towards a tall, gangly, oddly dressed character—not far from what the French might call “a piece of work”. 1
A popular—though unscholarly—explanation posits that, because the Ace of Spades was the plainest card in a 17th-century deck, “as de pique” became shorthand for an unremarkable, nondescript sort of person: the very opposite of the lavishly decorated court cards. You won’t find this one in the etymology dictionaries, but I rather like its logic.
There’s a far ruder reading, too. By this account, the phrase means something closer to “dressed up like a chicken’s bottom”, because the shape of the pip on the Ace of Spades resembles the croupion of a fowl 🐔—the fleshy rump we, for equally obscure reasons, call “the parson’s nose” in Britain, and the least presentable part of the bird.
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| Several croupions or “parson’s noses”. Image Credit: Fosse Meadows. |
This use, however, is recorded only from 1866 onwards, well over a century after the “ridiculous person” meaning. Still, it might be my favourite of the lot, even if it isn’t true—I’m sorely tempted to start calling Three-Card Monte “Chase the Chicken’s Bottom”!
Finally, the lexicographer Littré proposed another idea, involving a different creature. He thought the expression was a pun: that “as de pic” sounds like “(langue) d’aspic”, the venomous tongue of an asp 🐍. A neat notion—though other experts note that the examples Littré relied on do not quite support his theory.
Here is the part I find irresistible. The real Ace of Spades went the other way entirely: the very card the French made into a byword for shabby dressing became, under British law, the most ornate fellow in the pack—done up, as we Brits often say, like a dog’s dinner. 🐶 And it happened not for the sake of fashion, but for tax.
The Crown’s Cut 👑
The story begins not with the card itself, but with the English Crown’s desire to control and monetise playing cards. In 1463, following a petition from English card makers, Parliament banned cheap continental imports. This protectionism soon revealed a new opportunity: cards offered a reliable source of revenue—easy to count, widely sold and bought by players with money to lose. By 1588, building on this precedent, Queen Elizabeth I began treating cards as a royal cash cow, granting the first official monopoly on their manufacture.
The Worshipful Company of Makers of Playing Cards
In 1628, the Worshipful Company of Makers of Playing Cards was chartered under Charles I. Its purpose was to regulate the importation of cheap foreign cards, protect domestic makers and maintain quality. In return for the charter, the Company agreed to pay a tax to the Crown on every pack sold. Each maker was required to register a unique trademark—such as “The Great Mogul”—which was stamped on the cards or their wrapper to identify the manufacturer. Crucially, at this stage in history, this mark was merely a stamp of origin; it was not a tax receipt, nor was it placed specifically on the Ace of Spades.
Queen Anne’s Duty
In 1711, Queen Anne extended stamp duty—a tax requiring an official impression on a document or item to prove payment—to playing cards. The rate was raised to sixpence per pack as she sought additional revenue to fund the War of the Spanish Succession—a global conflict known in the colonies as Queen Anne’s War. This wasn’t a targeted attack on games of chance; cards were simply one item on a sprawling list of sundries that included dice, soap, paper, silks, calicoes, imported linens, and printed pamphlets and advertisements. All this to raise £1.8 million for Her Majesty’s supply.
To enforce the new law, every card manufacturer was required to register their business address with the Crown. It was a draconian measure. By some reckonings, the 1711 levy amounted to twelve times the pre-tax cost of the cheapest deck on the market and one and a half times that of the best! That eye-watering rate would later make forging the Ace of Spades a crime worthy of the gallows.
It wasn’t until 1712 that the Crown began hand-stamping a single card in the deck to serve as a receipt for the duty paid. For the first six years, this mark wasn’t reserved for the Ace of Spades; it simply went on whichever card happened to be at the top of the pack.
Crucially, the stamp itself was merely a receipt, not the tax itself. Until 1828, the duty was levied entirely on the paper wrapper sealing the deck. The hand-stamped card simply proved that the tax had been paid long after the wrapper was torn off and thrown away.
Around 1718, it became customary to stamp the Ace of Spades (presumably because it naturally sat at the top of most newly manufactured packs).
Stamping Out Counterfeits 💮
Before 1765, the Ace of Spades had only a plain pip. This changed when the Stamp Office began printing its official design to prove duty had been paid, though the actual tax stamp still appeared on the deck’s wrapping. This legally mandated design became the forerunner of the ornate Aces that makers began producing around 1862.
But these new “Duty Aces” had unintended consequences. Because makers were forbidden from printing their own Ace of Spades, tax evasion and forgery became rampant. The levy had increased disproportionately to the retail price of cards. Forging an Ace of Spades was a capital offence, yet despite the threat of the gallows, counterfeit Aces can be found in many museums and private collections, illustrating the scale of forgery at the time.
A Tale of Two Forgers: John Blacklin and Richard Harding
The astronomical tax rate made forgery inevitable, and for the Crown, the punishment for counterfeiting the official duty card was absolute: death. 🪦
In 1805, authorities launched a brutal crackdown on London’s underground card makers, uncovering two very different criminal masterminds. One target was twenty-eight-year-old John Blacklin, who was raking in an astonishing £8,000 a year—an absolute fortune at the time. Blacklin’s method was as ingenious as it was devious: to circumvent the exact wording of the law, he sold incomplete packs of fifty-one cards, dispatching errand boys to customers. When he was caught and sentenced to death, his lawyers argued that because the Ace was delivered separately, he had never technically vended a complete “pack of playing cards”. This audacious technical loophole escalated the case to the Twelve Judges—the senior common law judges who formed the three historic central courts in England—thereby halting his execution. There is no record of his death at the hands of the state, so it appears that John Blacklin managed to escape the gallows.
His contemporary, Richard Harding, was less fortunate. Harding was no street-level thug; he was a wealthy, genteel card maker of thirty-five, parading through London, fully powdered and dressed in immaculate black. Behind closed doors, however, he was a master forger. He operated a clandestine iron fly-press in a locked back room, donning a flannel jacket to stamp forged Aces with closely matched ink and a special liquid gloss.
When the Stamp Office finally closed in on his illicit operation, Harding desperately buried his forged copper plates in the dirt beside a privy, while authorities reportedly uncovered a staggering 3,000 counterfeit impressions of the Ace of Spades hidden in a box of foul linen.
He was tried and convicted at the Old Bailey, but the damage spread well beyond him. Skelton, the grocer who had helped fence the forged cards, was particularly affected; his wife, so overcome by the shame of the affair, fled to the countryside and cut her own throat in a ditch; the inquest, noting her disturbed state of mind, returned a verdict of lunacy. Meanwhile, Harding’s own apprentice testified that he had watched his master manufacture the illegal cards.
For his crimes, Richard Harding was sent to the scaffold in November 1805. In a final scene of grim comedy, the drop fell so suddenly that the attending clergyman went down with it, landing in a heap beside the condemned man. Harding was the last man ever hanged for forging the Ace of Spades—a death that sealed the card’s dark reputation for good. 💀
The Birth of Old Frizzle
To combat relentless counterfeiting, the Crown took two measures. In 1804, it reduced the duty to a more manageable shilling, making tax evasion less attractive to criminals. Then, in 1828, it tied the tax to a newly designed, highly intricate Ace of Spades bearing the individual maker’s name. This new Ace, affectionately dubbed “Old Frizzle”, resembled a miniature banknote—lavishly decorated with abundant foliage, a lion and a unicorn. The intricate engraving made the card far harder to reproduce and all but impossible for a forger working with copper plates.
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| A Thomas Creswick “Old Frizzle” Ace of Spades from a Georgian pack of playing cards, circa 1830. Image Credit: Royal House Antiques. |
The ultimate anti-forgery device, however, was the engraving process itself. The government commissioned the firm Perkins Bacon to utilise a revolutionary process called siderography. This technique enabled the unlimited reproduction of hardened steel plates, which retained far finer detail and resisted wear much better than traditional copper plates.
Because the Ace of Spades was effectively a financial security document, the authorities refused to allow it to be printed at Perkins Bacon’s private premises. Instead, the engraved steel plates were delivered to the Stamp Office at Somerset House. There, government clerks printed the Aces, keeping a meticulous record of every card produced.
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| The Penny Black. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons. |
As a fascinating historical aside, Perkins Bacon would go on to use this exact same steel-plate method to print the famous Penny Black postage stamp in 1840. The Penny Black was the world’s first adhesive postage stamp used in a public postal system.
Dressed to Impress
In 1862, the government further reduced the duty to threepence and shifted the tax entirely back to the officially printed wrappers. Card makers were finally free to produce their own designs for the Ace of Spades. Yet the custom of displaying their name on an intricately detailed Ace stuck.
By the time the tax was abolished in 1960 (because the administrative costs of collecting it had become excessive and more of a hassle than it was worth), the ornate design had become a permanent fixture of a standard pack of playing cards.
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| An Ace of Spades fancy dress costume. Image Credit: Fun Costumes via Amazon. |
And herein lies the ultimate irony. Patterns based on the English pack, including the standard Anglo-American deck, have kept the elaborate Ace of Spades ever since, even though the law no longer requires it. The very card the French used as a byword for a shabbily dressed individual became the best-dressed card in the deck. Maybe “dressed up like the Ace of Spades” really should be taken as a compliment!
Learn Duty Aces
The rich, dark history of the Ace of Spades provides the perfect theatrical hook for my “Duty Aces” card set. As promised at the beginning of this post, this unified set brings the lore to life through three distinct routines: “Imitation Aces”, “Traditional Twist” and “Death and Taxes”. You can learn all three tricks completely for free by following the link below.
Learn the “Duty Aces” Routines 👈
Alternatively, you might prefer to take the tales of “Old Frizzle”, John Blacklin, and the unfortunate Richard Harding, and weave them into a presentation for another card trick featuring the ominous Ace of Spades!
Footnotes
Alain Rey and Sophie Chantreau, Dictionnaire des expressions et locutions, nouvelle éd. (Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1989), 51.
Bibliography
Hirst, Tony. The Ace of Spades and Other Devilish Tales. 2024. Accessed 3 June, 2026. https://psychemedia.github.io/ace-of-spades-devilish-tales/.
“Trial of John Blacklin, 24 April 1805.” Proceedings of the Old Bailey. Accessed 3 June, 2026. https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t18050424-108.
“Trial of Richard Harding, 18 September 1805.” Proceedings of the Old Bailey. Accessed 3 June, 2026. https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t18050918-62.
Rey, Alain, and Sophie Chantreau. Dictionnaire des expressions et locutions. Nouvelle éd. Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1989.
“Richard Harding (Forger).” Wikipedia. Accessed 3 June, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Harding_(forger).
Wintle, Simon. “United Kingdom.” The World of Playing Cards. Accessed 3 June, 2026. https://www.wopc.co.uk/uk/.
Wintle, Simon. “Printing of Playing Cards: Letterpress.” The World of Playing Cards. Accessed 3 June, 2026. https://www.wopc.co.uk/cards/printing.
Worshipful Company of Makers of Playing Cards. “Worshipful Company of Makers of Playing Cards.” Accessed 3 June, 2026. https://www.makersofplayingcards.org/.
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