Well, we finally have confirmation that Office of the Minister of Magic is an appointive one, and almost certainly chosen through election by the members of the Wizengamot, among themselves. The Wizard of the Month on Rowling’s official site for April, 2006 was one Grogan Stump, a highly popular Minister for Magic, who held the office early in the 19th century, and was “appointed” in 1811. There are probably no general elections for any Ministry offices by the wizarding public.

The Wizengamot is a body of 50 witches and wizards representing a population of what Rowling now claims is about 3,000. The public is represented by the Wizengamot, through as yet undetermined procedures.

When one reflects that a nation with a population the size of that of the United States of America is represented by 100 Senators, and the 3.9+ million residents of the City of Los Angeles are governed by a Mayor, and Council of 15, the British wizarding world’s degree of individual representation in their overgovernment doesn’t look half bad.

In fact there are probably no more wizards in the world than there are people in the modern city of Chester, And those in the British isles would be able to muster a city no larger than modern Padstow in Cornwall, if that. A House of Commons/Representatives would hardly be reasonable for such a small population.

Consequently, the Minister of Magic is (probably) elected by the Wizengamot, is answerable to it, draws his support from the factions represented in it and subjects all proposed laws to its approval.

And anyone who wants a shot at the office of Minister has to have the backing of a majority of the members.

And, up to the opening of OotP, Albus Dumbledore was the Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot.

This may have been a largely ceremonial office, or he may have run the whole show.

And, as soon as the breech with the Ministry was settled, he immediately put on his “authority” hat again. Just like (we are invited to believe) all through VoldWar I. And found that it didn’t fit so well as before.

After making a total berk of himself over the previous year, Fudge’s chances of a continued term in office were already toast. But his replacement, Rufus Scrimgeour was far less willing to play ball at Albus Dumbledore’s prompting than Fudge had been, back in the day. The breech between the Headmaster and the Ministry may have been bridged, but it was not healed.

One seriously has to wonder whether replacing Fudge, with whom Albus was willing to work, with Scrimgeour — with whom he evidently couldn’t, might not have been someone’s clever idea. That replacement was certainly stage-managed from outside the Wizengamot itself, when you consider the outrageous ultimatum that Voldemort publicly handed Fudge. Between that and the internal calls for Fudge’s replacement after the Prophet outed the Ministry’s policy of denial, there wasn’t any way that Fudge could be retained, but the choice of replacement, and the manner of forcing the Wizengamot’s hand was... suggestive.

Albus also lost some of his oldest support on the Wizengamot when Griselda Marchbanks and Tiberius Ogden resigned in protest over his ouster the year earlier. We do not know who replaced them, either. Or who suggested those replacements.

Which may be something quite new. Back when Fudge took office, there was still a faction who would have liked to see Dumbledore take the position of Minister, himself.

Well, they could go on wanting. Dumbledore wasn’t so deluded that thought he could run the Wizengamot, AND the International Confederacy of Wizards (oh, yeah, he heads that too), AND the Ministry, AND personally oversee the training of Harry Potter all at the same time. Pick any three.

Besides, he had already turned that post down any number of times. He never did want that job. Or think that he ought to have it, anyway.

We do not know just when Albus Dumbledore became Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot, but I think we can safely assume he had a seat there well before he became Headmaster some time between ’57 and about ’63. He’d already turned the post of Minister for Magic down three times by then, and I doubt that the Wizengamot has ever tried to appoint anyone but one of their own. We don’t know when he became Transfiguration instructor at Hogwarts either. Molly Weasley claims that it was about the same time Slughorn (who is a good deal younger than Albus) started teaching as well, but whenever it was, it was long before her time, so this is something that she was told, not something that she remembers. But it is likely that Albus (and Slughorn) first took up a teaching post under Headmaster P. Nigellus Black in the 1920s. Or possibly earlier.

Not that that is particularly relevant here.

****

Over the three-year summer between Year 4 and Year 5 it became a widely held theory in some (generally younger) circles of fandom that Neville Longbottom was suffering from the effects of a botched or overly-strong memory charm placed on him at the time of his parents’ torture at the hands of Death Eaters. According to this theory he also was believed to “know something” about Voldemort.

I did not agree with this reading of the matter then, and we certainly don’t hear that much about it these days. This theory was not necessary to the story as it stood, and with the passage of time it becomes progressively less likely that anything Neville might have overheard as a toddler would be of any use regarding Voldemort’s present threat.

But then it was never made clear whether the Longbottom affair was actually a key event to something that we needed to discover, or if it was merely a piece of set-dressing. INdications now are that it was the latter.

In my own early reading of the matter, I suspected that the whole Longbottom affair may well have been a deliberate kamakaze operation undertaken for the express purpose of discrediting Barty Crouch Sr who was getting dangerously close to becoming the next Minister for Magic.

At that point, such a deliberate sacrifice looked like a possibility. With the prospect of a ww under Crouch’s leadership the remaining Death Eaters might have seen no hope of their managing to go underground and put their Voldemort years behind them.

Even if his most zealous followers’ hopes were in vain, and Voldemort had indeed been permanently destroyed, Crouch had to be stopped, or they, collectively or individually, had no future to speak of.

The Pensieve Four may even have known perfectly well that the Longbottoms’ had no critical information as to the whereabouts of Lord Voldemort.

That was my original reading of the situation.

By the end of OotP this reading was no longer quite satisfactory.

It became particularly unsatisfactory after Rowling stated on her official website that the Lestranges had been “sent” after the Longbottoms.

****

For one thing, we have no idea what Dumbledore thought of Crouch’s candidacy for the position.

Nor do we know whether there had even formally been a change in Minister pending at any time between 1981 and 1983, or indeed, between 1981 and 1990. We do not know for certain whether the MfM serves for a set term of years, or whether once appointed you can hold the position until you seriously blot your copybook with the Wizengamot, or simply get tired of all the agro. If the questions in the third round of the WOMBAT tests posted on Rowling’s official website are to be taked as a suggestion, a term of around 10 years appears to be typical, but we have no way of telling whether we can trust anything that showed up in the WOMBATs.

Barty may have been vying for the post off his own bat in the manner of attempting a palace coup. And at a guess; Barty Crouch, from what his enemies have to say about him, would not have been Albus Dumbledore’s first choice for Minister.

The LiveJournalist known as Pharnabazus, in his splendid examination and analysis of the operation of the interdependent patronage networks upon which wizarding society depends offers us a rather different reading of the elder Mr Crouch. One which gave my own attention to such details a bit of a jump-start and led me to a conclusion that throws much of my earlier reasoning into question.

Throughout GoF we never, not even once, paid the slightest account to a single word about Bartimius Crouch Sr that was given us by someone who honestly admired the man. And there certainly was such a person in evidence, someone who was not in the least reticent about Mr Crouch’s sterling qualities. But we completely dismissed Percy Weasley’s sincere regard for Crouch and instead took all of our reading of his character from “Mad-Eye Moody” and Sirius Black.

Now, just how clever was that? That’s downright embarassing.

The false Mad-Eye Moody assures us that Crouch was more ruthless than he ever was. Sirius Black tells us that Crouch was obsessed with catching just “one more Dark wizard”.

And yet Crouch clearly accepted Lucius Malfoy’s (and Avery’s) Imperius defense, and we sat there and watched him cut a deal with Karkaroff where the real Moody would have thrown away the key. This picture of “ruthless warrior for the Light” is further compromised by Barty Crouch Jr’s “confession”, and frankly, there are so many points of issue in that confession that don’t match up to what we saw going on in the book that I don’t believe a word of it. Can we at least agree that Barty Crouch Jr had an interest in seeing to it that his father was depicted in the worst possible light?

And as for Sirius Black; we have already had ample demonstration of Sirius Black’s unreliability where it comes to reading the character of others. We were consistently led to underestimate Pettigrew, which is usually a dangerous mistake, and I think that we may have been led to misread Crouch as well.

Not that the issue is likely to recur in the final outplay of the story. The story has moved well beyond Barty Crouch Sr’s place in it. But, what is more, Sirius admits that he only put together his picture of the Decline and Fall of Barty Crouch Sr after he escaped from Azkaban, and I really doubt that Crouch was still a household word by then. Consequently what he was patching together would have been predominently the rumors and innuendos which had been circulating in Azkaban since his son’s assumed death, or those which had been dredged up more recently (under whose direction I wonder?) that got hashed over in the Prophet in the course of reporting Crouch Sr’s absence from work and his suspected illness. Sirius’s personal satisfaction at the tale he has pieced together shines through his “wise counsellor” narrative like a beacon. Can we also agree that Sirius Black has no reason to admire the man who consigned him to life with the Dementors without a trial?

****

When you look past what is said about the man’s character by his enemies, and concentrate on his known actions, you get a picture of a pragmatic politician, just as corrupt, but probably no more so than any other we’ve been shown in the Potterverse to date, with a willingness to make any kind of deal that might forestall another Dark rising.

The wizarding world is a very small community. Crouch would have been able to gauge who it would be safe to cut a deal with, because he would know who had the most to lose. In fact, by all indications, until the year that Professor Quirrell came back from his travels on the continent twitching and stammering, the greater wizarding world appears to have taken no appreciable harm from the fact that Igor Karkaroff and Lucius Malfoy were walking free in it.

Pharnabazus suggests that in return for a tacit promise of his future good behavior, as well as a promise to keep his associates under restraint, Barty Crouch Sr accepted Lucius Malfoy’s Imperius defence and basically agreed to leave him alone so long as he behaved himself, and stayed out of politics. He quite possibly also either agreed to drop the prosecution of Malfoy’s sister-in-law, her husband, and her brother-in-law or arranged for their release.

This reading, supported by Pharnabazus’s full line of reasoning plays very well. [http://www.livejournal.com/users/pharnabazus/715.html]

Pharnabazus’s interpretation was posted some years ago, and we have been given more information to play with since then.

At that point we did not know that Lucius’s father Abraxis Malfoy was probably still alive at the time Voldemort was first defeated. It also fails to take the personalities of fanatics into account. Most notably the personalities of Bellatrix Lestrange and her associates.

For example: since, we didn’t know that Lucius’s father was probably still around at the end of VoldWar I, we did not consider that the Malfoy that Crouch Sr cut his deal with was likely to have been Abraxis, rather than Lucius.

Abraxis Malfoy survived long enough for his grandson to be claiming to remember him. So that puts his death somewhere in the ’80s, at least. I am more inclined to believe that he did not die until 1991–’92. His grandson Draco’s first year at Hogwarts.

Being finally off his father’s leash would explain why were were suddenly tripping over Lucius every time we turned around, from the summer of ’92 until he was forcably taken off the board at the end of Year 5, four years later.

It makes a LOT more sense for Abe and Barty to have been the deal makers. For one thing, we have no reason to believe that Abraxis was actually a DE himself, however much he may have approved of the public perception of what Voldemort stood for (like the elder Blacks, he took the word of the kids who were already inside the orgainization).

Malfoy and Crouch could have been at Hogwarts together. Before Riddle I suspect; or possibly right after, in the interegnum before there was a DE organization to consider. There was no Malfoy in the Slug Club with Riddle that we know of, nor a Crouch. As one of Sluggy’s aquaintances, Abraxis may even have been somewhat older than Riddle.

We do not know for certain how old Crouch Sr was either, although if he is the “1s” notation appended to Charis Black and Caspar Crouch’s marriage line as shown on the Black family tapestry, then his mother was born in 1919, suggesting a birth year for him around the early 1940s, making him much younger than a Malfoy who might be an associate of Horace Slughorn’s, but old enough to have passed through Hogwarts and into the Ministry before the DEs had shown up above the horizon.

But, given the entangled family connections among purebloods there is every reason to suspect that the Crouchs and the Malfoys might also have been connected to some degree. Possibly very closely connected. And Abraxis Malfoy may also have been younger than Riddle, although Slughorn implies that he was at least somewhat elderly at the time of his death.

In any case, there was at least a long-enough standing association between the Malfoy and Crouch families, or their House Elves would not have been so well aquainted — which had already been established in canon before Crouch banished Winky from his home. It is even possible that the late Madam Crouch was originally a Malfoy. Obliging your brother-in-law (or father-in-law) by accepting an Imperius defense for a family member is the kind of thing that would be expected of a Ministry official in the ww.

And Abraxis may have had leverage to bear on Crouch. He could have known about young Barty Jr’s involvement. If Lucius knew, and told him.

If so, he wouldn’t have been the only one to know of it. That was all but certainly the information that enabled the Lestranges to “talk their way out of Azkaban” as well.

But the Malfoys may not have known, although the Lestranges, certainly did. Barty Sr simply may have trusted Abraxis to keep his own son under control and out of further trouble.

Ergo: the chronology goes; Abe and Barty cut a deal, Lucius is put on a short leash by his father and behaves himself. From Abraxis’s PoV, Lucius’s in-laws, the Black/Lestrange connection, may have been percieved to be a potential threat to the family’s continuing peace of mind, but they were not his problem.

Or were they?

****

Which brings us to the Longbottom affair.

We have several possibilities here:

One of these is to run with Bellatrix’s statement, made at her sentancing — in which it is made clear that she doesn’t believe Voldemort is dead — and to wonder whether Albus’s statement that his followers do not know about his Horcruxes may have been somewhat more wide of the mark than usual and that she may be aware of exactly why he isn’t.

Another is to run with Rowling’s statement on the official site that the Lestranges were “sent” after the Longbottoms.

The main premise here is that somewhere along the line, someone, we do not know who, may have regarded Bella & Co as just too much of a potential threat. As one of the younger crop of Death Eaters, and a personal favorite of the Dark Lord (who she claims trained her in the Dark Arts himself) Bellatrix may not have seen as much action during VoldWar I as she thinks she ought to have, and is itching to prove herself. She would also have felt cheated of her inevitable glory in the Dark Lord’s service. In short, she was a totally loose cannon that any Death Eater who wants to keep his head down and make his peace with the Ministry could not afford. She had to be neutralized, and quickly, before she rocked the boat, went looking for the Dark Lord and managed to bring him back.

From this starting point we have three almost equally plausible scenarios which might explain the Longbottom affair.

1. The first is that it all played out exactly as it appears. Bellatrix and her companions, young (late 20s), rash, and self-deluded, independently managed to convince themselves that the Longbottoms, popular Aurors, who Voldemort may have expressed some interest in over the last weeks of hiis rise, might have information leading to Voldemort(or his Horcrux)’s current whereabouts, and staged the attack unprompted by anyone. Thereby causing a complete public embarassment for all their families, and jeopardizing the whole Malfoy/Crouch agreement.

This works, but like I say, Rowling has stated on her official site that the Lestranges were “sent” to attack the Longbottoms.

2. A second possibility is that somebody, as yet unidentified, quickly realized that these particular loose cannons were all too likely to actively go off looking for Voldemort, and that there was a very real chance that they might find him. Consequently, they needed to be neutralized before they made any progress in that direction. Consequently, the Lestranges were judiciously fed disinformation leading them to the Longbottoms.

3. Or, Lucius orchestrated the affair himself, behind his father’s back, to serve his own purposes. We get every indication that Lucius and Bellatrix were rivals. They hate each other’s guts, and you get no impression that this is a recent development. Lucius doesn’t even need to have known about Barty’s involvement at all.

And, Lucius has a wife and family to consider, after all. The Lestranges are “inconvenient”.

Nor would I bet much on the chances that Lucius was unaware of the fact that with Bellatrix and any hypothetical children of hers solidly out of the running, his own wife and infant son were now the collateral heirs of whatever remained of the Black fortunes.

Lucius is not a complete fool, but he judges other people’s motives by his own. It is altogether possible that he was convinced that although Crouch might make deals, he would just as soon throw Lucius, and his entire “network” into Azkaban and loose the key. Lucius may have feared that if Bellatrix got seriously out of line Crouch might well use that as an excuse to break any agreement that had been struck with his father. For that matter, Lucius may have believed that if Crouch climbed to the top of the Ministry ladder, he might feel that he could afford to dispense with earlier agreements. And Crouch was only one step from the top, and he was ambitious.

Of course one also has to stop and consider the Black fortune itself — including all of the nasty knick-knacks — in this equation. Lucius may have completely disregarded the complication presented by the Crouch agreement. His objective, if he was behind the incident could have been soley to eliminate Bellatrix from the line of inheritance.

Mind you, the last thing that Lucius ever wanted would be to see Crouch completely discredited. Should Crouch be so thoroughly discredited that he would be forced to resign in disgrace, his successor would not be aware of the agreement at all, and Lucius was depending on that agreement to ensure his return to a quiet life without further interference from the Ministry. The best of all possible worlds would be to shed these particular encumbrances while engineering a situation which would leave Crouch exactly where he was for as long as possible. With no backtrail leading to himself.

****

Crouch was badly stung in the opperation, since Barty Jr managed to get himself roped into Bella’s schemes, which, if he had earlier managed to convince his father of his innocence, would explain his father’s bug-eyed fury at his getting caught out. But Abraxis conspicuously kept to his end of their bargain, and Lucius kept his head down.

Later, Crouch was swept up in a general personnel rotation, probably in 1990, attendant upon Fudge’s installation as Minister, and Amelia Bones took Crouch’s place as the head of the DMLE. Amelia, unaware of any gentlemen’s bargains which Crouch might have made, off the record, authorized a series of raids upon the homes of suspected Dark wizards over the following year. Abraxis died in an outbreak of dragon pox in early 1992. From that point, all deals are off.

There is a good deal of reason to suppose that Amelia Bones’s appointment to the head of the DMLE was of comparatively recent date. As Pharnabazus points out, we only began hearing of Ministry raids on suspected Dark Wizards’ homes, including the Malfoys’, at the beginning of CoS. To a man of Fudge’s caliber, Crouch, even somewhat discreditied, was far too close and far too ambitious for comfort. If he was not reassigned in a general rotation about the time of Fudge’s appointment, he would have been shunted to the sidelines soon after Fudge took office.

In any case; Lucius (or whoever was behind it) could have been confident that it would take very little effort on his part to goad Bellatrix into an act of supreme folly and get her out of his way.

Any Auror of the day would probably have had as much information as the Longbottoms did. So any Auror would have served the purpose insofar as extraction of information goes. (Oh, well, yes, the Lestranges DID probably get at least some information from the Longbottoms — on other subjects of interest — and may have passed it on before they were captured.)

Which raises the question of why target the Longbottoms?

The simplest reading is that the Longbottoms were specifically targeted because of their popularity, and possibly because Voldemort had shown an interest in the family during the last phase of his rise. We have it from Rowling, posted on her site that the Lestranges were not aware of the Prophesy.

Voldemort would have taken great care that most of his followers were not aware of that Prophecy. But as Aurors and known members of Dumbledore’s Order (which was NOT a secret society in VoldWar I) the Longbottoms might have been desirable targets in any case. There was probably no other real reason unless we can assume a purely personal grudge upon the part of the Lestranges against the Longbottoms — which is always a possibility in such a tight-knit society as the wizarding world. In any case, Neville may very well have a few more mysteries about him, but obsolete information on the former whereabouts of VaporMort is not one of them.

****

I do contend that even if Rowling hadn’t given us the statement that the Longbottoms were targeted by a 3rd party, somebody’s real purpose for that whole exercise was to get shut of a potential embarassment to his own best advantage. But to someone who knew of Barty Jr’s loyalties, discrediting Crouch is still a possibility.

By goading the Lestranges to publicly commit the sort of atrocity which would get the whole wizarding world — now slipping into complacency after Voldemort’s defeat — up in arms, he would be setting a stage in which Barty Jr, who, if nothing else, was a superb actor, could be trusted to enact the unjustly accused (possibly) innocent victim to as wide an audience as possible, in an atempt to save his own skin. The Pensieve Four would thereby also place Crouch’s father into a no-win situation, and whichever action Crouch Sr decided to take the matter, he was going to end up looking bad.

On the other hand, just any Auror of the day was not necessarily a distant Black family connection. As Frank Longbottom seems to be. He was also in the succession for the Black family holdings, although his claim was not as strong as Bellatrix’s or Narcissa’s.

Whatever the backstory of the Longbottom affair might have been, the Lestranges could hardly have gone into it with their eyes completely shut. They had to have been aware of the probable cost to themselves. They had Crouch Sr’s track record to work from and they had narrowly “talked their way out of Azkaban” once already, and this stunt was bound to cash in any barganing chip that they had used to do it. If they were caught, they were not going to be let off a second time. It is uncertain whether Crouch Jr realized exactly what he was agreeing to let himself in for. But he was young enough for the grand gesture of martyrdom to have its own appeal. Particularly if he could bring down his hated father by embracing it.

Or they all really were arrogant enough to believe that they wouldn’t get caught.

We have already been told that Sirius Black was not the only suspect to be imprisoned without trial. However, the amount of publicity attached to the Longbottom affair, and the fact that the attack was carried out well after the war was officially over guaranteed that Crouch Sr wasn’t going to be able to get away with that particular maneuver this time. They were assured of at least some form of a trial.

The possibility that the Lestranges and Crouch Jr deliberately put themselves into Azkaban seems to be supported by Bellatrix Lestrange’s grandiose statement at their sentencing. However, now that we’ve met the lady a few times more, it seems just as likely that she was merely making a grand gesture in the face of the inevitable. And even if Barty Jr did understand when he agreed to it that he was engaged on what would turn out to be a suicide mission, the full horror of what this entailed was not clear to him until he was actually in the custody of the Dememtors. Several months’ influence of the Dementors, followed by a decade under Imperius as his father’s prisoner were quite enough to turn his mind altogether. It is no wonder that he sincerely loathed any of his former fellows who hadn’t the nerve to go to Azkaban for their Dark Lord’s sake; with a particularly rich store of resentment reserved for Lucius Malfoy, that he was willing to take out on the man’s son.

The news that Crouch Jr was still alive and in his father’s custody was the real buried treasure in Bertha Jorkins’s damaged memory. Not that her more up-to-date, surface information regarding the revival of the TriWizard Tournament and the hiring of Alastor Moody as the new DADA teacher at Hogwarts was at all to be despised either. Pettigrew had been able to fill his Master in on nearly everything else of importance that had been going down in the British wizarding world from the night at Godric’s Hollow, right up to the evening that he made his escape from Hogwarts. (Although he doesn’t seem to have mentioned the Diary.) He had been keeping a whisker in the spy game from his refuge with the Weasleys over the entire period, and he heard pretty much everything that was floating around in public domain, as well as whatever spin that the Ministry had put on it, but he did not know of these more recent events. Between the two of them, Jorkins’s and Pettigrew’s information was invaluable.

Therefore, Voldemort was well aware that the Lestranges and young Crouch had deliberately gone to Azkaban and that they had tried to get whatever information the Aurors of the time may have had as to his whereabouts. The news of his escape and imprisonment by his father spoke loudly in favor of Crouch Jr’s continued loyalty, since it had remained uncompromised by his having made any kind of peace with either his father or with the Ministry.

The Pensieve Four’s suicide mission had succeeded in its covert objective. If there was any such covert objective. Crouch was soon being viewed with grave misgivings by the cooler heads at the Ministry, and in the Wizengamot, and his chances of becoming the next Minister for Magic gradually faded from the realm of the possible. At some point, probably around the time Cornelius Fudge took office, or soon after, he was shunted sideways into the Department of International Magical Cooperation, where his growing fixation over the hunt for Dark wizards could be a source of less potential embarassment, or potential damage to the Ministry’s reputation.

****

In point of fact, I now suspect that his “fixation” was no greater than it ever had been, but merely the spin that the Prophet put on it. The perceptions of the Wizengamot, and of the wizarding world in general had become so accustomed to a world without He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, that Barty Crouch’s “constant vigillance” made them all highly uncomfortable. One recalls that Alastor Moody “retired” right about the same time we first were introduced to Barty Crouch Sr, the Head of International Magical Cooperation.

One now wonders whether Moody’s retirement was altogether voluntary, either. It should be noted that no new candidates were accepted into the Auror training program after 1991, when Nymphadora Tonks began her training under Moody. And that he retired immediately after she and her cohort passed their final qualifications suggests that the Wizengamot saw little need to recruit a great many new Aurors. By then Fudge would have consolidated his position as Minister.

As to the timing of Crouch’s transfer; At this point it is still somewhat uncertain. Bertha Jorkins, according to Percy Weasley had been in “our Department” at the time her memory had been damaged, which would indicate that Crouch had already been removed from his position as the Head of the DMLE. But we do not know how long poor Bertha had been getting underfoot in Bagman’s office before her eventual disappearance.

Her transfer into Bagman’s office has all the earmarks of a bit of spite on Crouch’s part. He despised Bagman and had probably never been convinced by his bluff, “unwitting tool” cover story. For that matter, neither am I, although unlike Crouch, I do admit its possibility.

****

Meanwhile, we were left with the default impression (possibly completely erroneous) that the removal of Crouch Sr from the running back in 1982-’83 had thrown the position of Minister for Magic wide open for the taking. We went through the whole “3-year summer” with the impression that the office was pretty much up for grabs by whichever faction was able to insert their own candidate. We were also left with the impression that the first two names that had been being spoken of regarding it were those of Dumbledore, who didn’t want it, and Crouch who was no longer being considered.

In point of fact, there may have been no uncertainly regarding the office at that point in time at all. It is altogether possible that Crouch’s whole power grab at the end of VoldWar I was an attempt at a “palace coup” that failed. Which would further raise the likelihood that he had eventually been removed from his position at the head of the DMLE in order to keep him from being in a position to make further mischief. We have certainly heard no suggestion that the Death Eaters still in circulation had a viable candidate of their own, and we know nothing whatsoever about the background of Millicent Bagnole.

Millicent Bagnole!? Who the hell is Millicent Bagnole?

Millicent Bagnole was the previous Minister for Magic. The one before Fudge. The one who seems (according to the WOMBAT information) to have taken office immediatly following the end of VoldWar I. She certainly held the office back in the late 1980s. It says so right there in Order of the Phoenix.

****

Which, at long last, brings us back to Cornelius Fudge.

On my first reading of the series, by the end of GoF I was absolutely convinced that Fudge had been the Death Eater’s candidate, for he had certainly been their tool.

But, even before the release of Order of the Phoenix, I was no longer solidly convinced of this. For, while it is no mystery to any reader as to just whose pocket Fudge had been living in lately, or whose purposes his official actions or policies were serving, there were clues scattered throughout the series which suggest that this had by no means always been the case. It even began to seem quite believable that Fudge might be neither “ever-so-evil” nor even “ever-so-stupid”. It could merely have been that he really was “ever-so-weak-and-unlucky”. Just how much do we really know of the man?

Fudge states, in the course of the PoA eavesdropping scene at the Three Broomsticks, that he was a Junior Minister in the Dept. of Magical Catastrophes on the day Sirius Black was arrested, the day after Voldemort’s fall, and that Fudge was one of the first people on the scene to witness the arrest. We don’t know how long after this the Crouch/Lestrange trial took place, but I would imagine that it took place the following year. There had certainly been no question of Fudge becoming Minister for Magic at that point. Even if the sitting Minister had been making any noises about retiring, Crouch had seemed enough of a sure thing for the top spot that discrediting him might have left a fine window of opportunity for anyone who was poised to use it, but Fudge was far too junior a player at that point for it to have been him.

At the time of the Longbottom affair Fudge was largely unknown to the greater wizarding public. Inside the Ministry, his position was high enough for quite a few people to have some idea of who he was, but not high enough for many to really “know” him.

What is more; Fudge didn’t even become Minister for Magic until the year before Harry started Hogwarts.

That’s right. Not until 1990. Or, more accurately, “five years ago” from the vantage point of the beginning of the autumn term of Harry’s 5th year.

Admittedly, that little nugget of information was tucked into an article in the Quibbler, but the date that the current Minister for Magic took office is the kind of matter of public record that even the Quibbler is unlikely to have gotten wrong. And this information throws a number of people’s previous speculations about Fudge right out the window.

In rereading the Three Broomsticks eavesdropping scene in PoA, something else struck me.

Cornelius Fudge speaks with a remarkable degree of authority about James and Lily’s private lives and friendships. Things which do not make much sense coming from a casual observer. How would he know that?

I do rather think that unless Rowling was simply putting words into Fudge’s mouth because someone needed to say them and he happened to be there, or the private lives of the poor, tragic, young Potters was tabloid news for long enough that “everyone” knew these details — which doesn’t seem to be the case, since it is apparently NOT widely known that they were in hiding under the Fidelius Charm and that Black was supposed to have been their Secret Keeper — and Fudge admits that it was classified information — we may have been overlooking a fairly important clue. But I am unwilling to stake any specific amount as to it’s being a clue about what. Possibly of nothing more than that the author has a weakness for cutting corners and indulging herself with episodes of “because I say so.”

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One possibility is that even though Fudge seems unlikely to have ever been a member of Dumbledore’s Order, he might well have been a lot more deeply in Dumbledore’s councils during VoldWar I, or since then, than we’ve otherwise been led to understand. If this is the case, that description of Dumbledore’s “suddenly looking at Fudge as if he had not seen him before” in response to Fudge having deliberately brought a Dementor into the castle in GoF may have a lot more context than a surface reading would give us. It is possible that Dumbledore has just realized that he just made another of his huge mistakes.

He hasn’t been paying attention; his inattention has unwittngly lost him an ally to subversion and he is seeing ghosts of the past. In particular the ghost of a young man by the name of Peter Pettigrew. Dumbledore certainly adjusts his thinking without hesitation after realizing this, for by the time Fudge storms off in a huff Dumbledore is clearly convinced that Fudge is not to be trusted and is no longer surprised by any of Fudge’s obstructionisms.

But what now appears most likely to me is that back in the days that he was blamelessly fulfilling the peter principle in the Department of Magical Catastrophes, Cornelius Fudge was probably a fairly effective gatherer of information (he is certainly an incorrigible gossip). Much of the data regarding the Potters is likely to have been collected in the investigation of the damage to the House in Godric’s Hollow, which his Department would reasonably have been called in to conduct. And he has forgotten little of that data in the ensuing 12 years. Although he has probably refreshed his memory by rereading all of the case files since Sirius’s escape. I am growing inclined to think that a younger Cornelius Fudge was probably a passably honest civil servant, and a staunch supporter of the Ministry of the day, without the slightest suspicion of Death Eater associations to taint his reputation.

In those days, along with much of the rest of the wizarding public, he would have also been a great admirer of Albus Dumbledore. But Fudge is not an intrinsically clever man, nor one of strong character. And he has a fatal flaw. He loves — truly loves — to be regarded as important.

It was not a hunger for Power, in the Slytherin style, that opened the way to the subversion of Cornelius Fudge. It is an abiding thirst for Glory, a characteristically Gryffindor weakness. Over the first four books Fudge has demonstrated upon every appearance that he clearly delights in basking in the importance of being the Minister for Magic. He loves to address the public, to give speeches to the masses, statements to the press. He revels in being in the public eye and to be seen rubbing shoulders with the wealthy and influential. But until Dolores Umbridge started playing the Fisherman’s Wife in year 5, he shows remarkably little eagerness for actually exercising the power to do what a Minister does — which is to impose legeslation upon his constituency.

Not until he was called upon to do so in support of one of his (comparitively few) personal allies — at which point he responded with blind faith in her reading of the situation. And I think that by the end of GoF those few allies had become his handlers and controllers. And, to a large extent his wardens.

As to Fudge’s steps leading downward;

In the first book we are told only that Fudge is a bumbler, deeply dependent upon Dumbledore’s guidance, requesting help at every turn. This becomes somewhat more understandable once we realize that he is rather young for his job, and it was his first year in office. And as Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot, Dumbledore is effectively his boss. Possibly even his patron.

In Chamber of Secrets, his instincts are to blindly support Dumbledore. When first pressed, he even ineffectively attempts to oppose Malfoy, although he soon knuckles under to Malfoy’s pressure.

He was still playing pig-in-the-middle at the opening of PoA. He approved Lupin’s hiring, he brushed the Aunt Marge imbroglio under the rug. But he still surrounded the school with Dementors and he is beginning to act with more confidence in his own authority each time he comes on stage. Something or someone was clearly bolstering his self-esteem throughout this period. And I think that particular someone’s name was probably Dolores Umbridge.

And she had help. Lucius Malfoy had suffered a severe setback at the end of CoS when he was removed from the Hogwarts Board of Governors. From all subsequent indications, he seems to have been improving the shining hour since that point by making inroads inside the Ministry itself, using his son’s injury by an enraged hippogryff as a pretext to camp out at the Ministry and get a handle on Fudge. And, perhaps more to the point, Fudge’s personal staff.

Crouch, no longer heading the DMLE is not in a position to object to this breech of his old agreement with the Malfoys, since he himself is no longer in a position to protect Malfoy and his “clients” from Ministry raids. And besides, he can hardly fault a father for attempting to personally see to it that a dangerous beast which has injured his child is disposed of.

I think that this was the turning point in Fudge’s alliances, and I will go so far as to suggest that the main event that brought it about is that, behind the scenes, probably at some point during Year 3, Lucius Malfoy had managed to enlist the support of Fudge’s chief assistant, Dolores Umbridge. Who has a great deal less general good-will than her boss, and is certainly far more ruthless.

I also very much suspect that Madam Umbridge has always cordially disliked Albus Dumbledore, loathed his values, and deplored his influence upon Minister Fudge. To be given tacit permission to take an active hand in lessening that influence would have been a goal right up her alley.

It was also during year 3 that Fudge was being encouraged to spend a great deal of his time in the company of Dementors “for his protection”. This will hardly have had a beneficial effect upon his judgement, either.

Sirius Black’s escape from Azkaban seems to have offered Malfoy a very nice window of opportunity. Just about every time we saw Fudge in PoA he had a Dementor or two in tow. I suspect that this was at Malfoy’s urging, presenting the rationale that as a man who was on the scene at Black’s capture, Fudge stood second in risk only to Harry Potter, and that as the guards of Azkaban prison the Dementors were the very best “protection” that a man in Fudge’s dangerous position would be able to find.

You cannot be around Dementors for any length of time without them having an effect on you. Even if they are not actively feeding on your emotions. By the end of the book Fudge’s judgement had to have become compromised by their continued presence. Nor do we know how long it took after Sirius’s escape from Hogwarts before Fudge dared to dispense with this “protection”, although he had better sense than to bring one to the World Cup. (At which unmistakable Death Eater activity broke out and the Dark Mark was sent up over the campgrounds. Re-call the guards...)

In the fourth book Fudge is popping out with “Lucius Malfoy says” on just about every conceivable occasion, summoning Dementors and bringing them into the castle, and by the end of the book is vigorously opposing Dumbledore directly.

As to other events of Goblet of Fire; I also suspect that Lucius Malfoy has a seat on the Board of the Daily Prophet, and it seems clear that Rita Skeeter’s nasty smear campaign painting Dumbledore as a senile old dingbat, and her gradual recalibrating of the public attention drawn to Harry Potter from Tragic Hero to “disturbed adolescent” during year four was at Malfoy’s direction. Despite every opportunity to know better, I rather suspect that Fudge has always tended to believe whatever he reads in the Prophet.

I think it is abundantly clear, in hindsight, that Fudge had been well and truly gotten at, and that this probably had taken place fairly recently. Because — as he says himself at the end of Book 4, he had actively supported Dumbledore, and most of Dumbledore’s more controversial decisions right down the line, right up to that very point.

But for the past year and more, between Malfoy and Umbridge, they had Fudge surrounded. He never had a chance. And once Harry spilled the beans about a return of the Dark Lord, over Year 5 Malfoy and Umbridge, between them, were keeping Fudge on a very short leash.

This subversion was done quite deliberately, and quite recently, and throughout the events of OotP, it is abundantly clear that Fudge was dancing to Dolores’s tune every bit as eagerly as to Malfoy’s. If not more.

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Madam Umbridge is not a very intelligent woman and she may be a crude plotter, but she is very quick to react to any new information that threatens her agenda (although she usually acts ineffectively and in excesss of the actual requirements). Although we were been given no clear indication that she knowingly supported Voldemort prior to DHs, the final book revealed that she is related to at least one DE, and probably several of them. What was always evident, however, is that she was every bit as ready as the hardest-line Death Eater to use whatever methods appear to be the quickest means to bring about her goals. And the legality or ethics of those methods is immaterial.

Until DHs, we did not even know whether Madam Umbridge was, herself, a pureblood witch — although we had been led to draw such a conclusion from her associations. But she could also have been one of those well-established halfbloods who the pureblood faction are so conspicuously gracious as to consider “useful”. They will have used this particular line of flattery before. Patronage is a very powerful tool. Particularly in a society such as that which runs the wizarding world.

What also seemed to be unquestionable is that Madam Ubridge is not at all as clever as she thinks she is. Particularly once she starts dealing with people who are intellectually a few cuts above Fudge.

Her fixation on part-humans appeared to be her greatest weakness, and it is a curious one. We have no clear understanding as yet as to just how widespread this view — at her level of intensity — is within the WW or whether this is a view particular to a specific faction within it. My own gut-level response was that it might have been a preoccupation of halfbloods who are grasping at the straw of their humanity as their own particular badge of superiority. (Although the existence of the likes of Fenrir Greyback at least explains the public’s horror of werewolves.) In the wake of DHs it is clear that this reading was wrong.

We do know that it is a view that is at least to some degree shared, but not whether Umbridge’s iteration of this obsession is an exaggerated form of this particular prejudice limited to herself, or whether there is an actual political faction which upholds these views and attempts to dictate Ministry policy accordingly. Certainly she blinkers herself with her prejudices even more thoroughly than does Professor Snape.

We also saw that once she was in an actual position of power, rather than merely as a trusted assistant who must answer to someone else for her actions, she was out of her depth and over the ensuing months managed to lose her head altogether. By the end of the book she had become a cariacture of herself.

If we can believe even a quarter of the Quibbler’s aspersions regarding Fudge’s dealings with the Goblins, it is beginning to look to me as if it may well have been Umbridge’s crowd who originally put Fudge into office. With little or no opposition from either Malfoy (who hasn’t a seat on the Wizengamot) & Co., who saw little to object to, and much that they might ultimately be able to work with, or Dumbledore, who saw a decent record in the Magical Catastrophies Department, and an admittedly lightweight character with a fair amount of personal good-will. Fudge’s own background seems compatible with that of the more open-minded of the pureblood faction, as far as it applies to fully human wizards, even if his background is probably not up to the standards of the Blacks. I suspect very few of the current pureblood faction are up to the standards of the Blacks. His having been proposed for the position of Minister may even have originally been a sop to wizarding unity.

And Malfoy’s faction evidently saw no reason to attempt to displace him, when subverting him was just as easily accomplished.

And, if Fudge turned out to be something that fell through the cracks while Dumbledore was occupied with Harry and Sirius Black, at least Dumbledore realizes this by the end of Goblet of Fire.

****

It was no surprise to me that the main conflict throughout Order of the Phoenix was not between Harry and Voldemort, but between Dumbledore and the Ministry. That situation was one that it was absolutely essential to reconcile before we were ever likely to see any possible progress on the flashier half of the problem represented by Lord Voldemort.

The Ministry and Dumbledore were hardly working together through HBP, but at least they were both on the same page over the need to address the problem of Lord Voldemort.

One major question still left unanswered is; If subverting Fudge was so easily accomplished, why did it take the Death Eaters so long to get around to it? He was in office for nearly three years before Malfoy put any determined efforts into it.

We heard very little (and that mostly from Draco) regarding Lucius Malfoy prior to CoS. At which point we learned that there has been a series of raids of suspected Dark wizard’s homes. From then, until the end of OotP, even when he wasn’t directly under our noses, he had been hovering about on the edges throughout every single book and there was simply no avoiding him. Well, now it seems we know why. As of the opening of CoS, the Ministry is being a nuisance, the Dark Lord and his own father are gone, the way seems to be clear for him to make his own bid for power. And he was putting his ducks in a row to do it.

Although once the Dark Mark went up over the World Cup campgrounds, he must have realized that his timing couldn’t have been worse. He was too committed to his power grab to withdraw from it now, and that Voldemort would probably co-opt any useful efforts he managed to set under way.

If he was lucky. He also has the loss of the Diary hanging over his head.

So he had just best soldier on and hope that he will be lucky.

As for Fudge; clearly he knew nothing of Voldemort’s impending return. How could he if his loyalty to Albus was only recently undermined by Malfoy? He does not bear the Dark Mark. He didn’t even know what it was. And I do not think that Malfoy ever filled him in on just what their “mutual” objectives really were. It was Malfoy that Fudge had chosen to follow, not Voldemort.

As to the scene in the Hospital wing at the end of GoF, we’re limited by Harry’s reading of the situation, but the announcement of Voldemort’s return seems to have genuinely stunned and appalled Fudge.

But the “strange smile” that Harry notes once Fudge realizes that Dumbledore is serious about Voldemort’s return was highly disturbing. That was clearly the point at which Umbridge’s undermining and Rita Skeeter’s groundwork paid off. And by the end of the confrontation Fudge is actively and consciously opposing Dumbledore with everything he’s got. After that point Fudge only let his defenses down briefly in one last futile plea to get Dumbledore to say that it really wasn’t so. And that single last plea makes the situation just all the more disturbing.

I think that it is pretty clear to the reader that Fudge had solidly thrown in his lot with Malfoy.

Whether or not he believed he had no other choice is uncertain. Whether he suddenly realized that it might actually be possible to profit from supporting Voldemort, is even less certain, as well as far less likely. But he has probably always believed that he could profit from supporting Malfoy.

And he had clearly chosen to cut himself loose from Dumbledore.