Did Voldemort plan to set Regulus up?
Mar. 17th, 2021 09:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sunnyskywalker posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
deathtocapslockKreacher tells us that Regulus joined the Death Eaters when he was sixteen. Which at first sounds unimportant. After all, Draco too (if we accept Harry’s prejudiced jump to that conclusion—but let’s do so for the sake of argument) took the Dark Mark at that age. And Voldemort seems to recruit most of his followers young, when they’re easier to manipulate.
Except… Draco wasn’t exactly a typical case, was he? He’d been assigned a mission inside the school, while most Death Eaters were expected to operate in the wider world. More importantly, Voldemort fully expected Draco to fail: he’d either be killed, sent to Azkaban, or give Voldemort an excuse to kill him. Draco’s assignment was Voldemort’s punishment to Lucius for losing the Diary and botching the Ministry raid. Draco was never important in himself. (Not even after his unexpected success. Does it look like Voldemort valued Draco’s service after he proved his relative competence? Because it looked to me like he was just enjoying tormenting the whole family all year.) So we probably shouldn’t use Draco as an example of Voldemort’s normal recruiting practice.
There’s another complication: sixteen-year-olds are not of age. They’re sharply limited in how much magic they can perform outside of school. They can probably get away with doing magic inside the homes of adult witches and wizards and in exclusively wizarding districts like Hogsmeade and the London Alleys. But they can’t, say, Apparate to join Muggle-baiting parties in Muggle areas. And they can’t Apparate to meet their master in an overgrown graveyard or haunted cave or wherever when he summons them without getting caught either. (Unless an older Death Eater side-alongs them everywhere, I suppose, and they never use their wands in Muggle areas. But then what’s the point of including them?) Oh, and of course they’re stuck at school most of the year, which limits them even more. That’s also true of the seventeen-year-olds.
There also might be downsides to having actual Death Eaters hanging out in school for a year or more. Not the Dark Mark, which I’m pretty sure can be hidden. But your group will lose a lot of mystique if instead of (barely) adults who are out living what the kids imagine to be exciting lives, your members are those guys in the next dorm room who never wash their socks and think fart noises are hilarious. Kind of makes joining look less glamorous, you know? It also might not be a great plan to give your followers long stretches of time away from you and further orders to think about what they’ve done. Keeping them fully involved, so they don’t have a chance to catch their breaths and get perspective, seems preferable. And of course you have to worry that Dumbledore might catch on. You know, Dumbledore: your arch-nemesis who also happens to be a Legilimens? It’s one thing if he notices that some students think the Death Eaters sound cool, and quite another if he notices some have already joined and might be worth interrogating.
So, while schoolkids might occasionally be able to join in violent mayhem, their opportunities to do so were rare and often risky. Probably more trouble than it was worth in most cases. They’ll still be gullible and easy to recruit at eighteen; better to tantalize them with the possibility of joining while they’re in school and wait until they’ve just left to reel them in. Or at least until they are just about to, if he wants to make sure they won’t get caught up in new jobs and such and cool on the idea before he can mark them. Spring break of seventh year, maybe.
Unless, of course, they’re so individually valuable that he wants to make sure he gets them as soon as possible, for reasons other than how good they are with curses. Barty Junior might have been one such. Even if he could only report tiny scraps of information he picked up from his father, getting such a good spy and potential assassin locked in early seems worth the risk. And if he manages to pass on something genuinely useful while he’s still in school, well, there’s no going back once he’s committed treason, is there? No way out for Barty. But this is speculative. Barty might have taken the Mark at eighteen, perhaps no more than a couple of months before Voldemort got vaporized.
Even assuming Voldemort did mark exceptionally valuable followers who were underage, did Regulus have that kind of value? Not as far as we know. His family was important, yes. His grandfather had influence at the Ministry and an Order of Merlin. But we don’t even know if Arcturus had a seat on the Wizengamot or any other actual position. Could Regulus have given the Death Eaters information or influence they couldn’t get any other way? And we just never heard about it?
Maybe. And maybe Regulus joining was the key to convincing Barty to join, if they were friends. Or maybe Voldemort just took a “collect them all” approach and didn’t much care if they weren’t useful for a few years. But we don’t know of any reason Regulus should be individually valuable, or that Voldemort should have thought it so crucial to risk recruiting kids in fifth or sixth year instead of waiting another year or two.
Which takes us back the Draco scenario: did Voldemort have a reason to want Regulus to end up in a sticky situation?
Well. Sirius does tell us that his father put every protection known to wizardkind on their house. Orion and Walburga probably weren’t afraid of the Ministry, or at least not to that extent. They (or at least Orion’s dad) were pals with the Ministry. So who does that leave?
(Okay, maybe they were quaking in their boots at the thought that their renegade son might lead the Order of the Phoenix to their doorstep. Assuming they’d heard of the Order, which is by no means certain. But this doesn’t strike me as terrible likely.)
Even if we ignore the dodgy dates on the tapestry sketch, we’d wonder whether Orion Black—whose eldest child was born in late 1959—might have been the right age to have overlapped with Tom Riddle at school. Unless Orion was a very old or very young father, they must have been in the same generation. So, was he one of the few people who knew Tom was Voldemort? Had he once joined Tom, and then got cold feet and decided to hide? Or was there some other reason he might have believed Voldemort would be after the family?
If you do consider the tapestry sketch, you really have to wonder why Orion died in 1979. He probably wasn’t openly murdered by Death Eaters or Voldemort. Even Sirius probably would have mentioned that. Maybe Orion just died in one of the dragon pox epidemics which seem to have killed off half the grandparents in the series. But it’s awfully suspicious timing.
Orion may have expected an attack, and thought that Regulus was safe as long as he was at Hogwarts or in the heavily-protected family home. He didn’t realize until too late that Voldemort might attack by recruiting Regulus. And recruiting the family’s beloved son with the ultimate goal of setting him up for a terrible fate to punish the family—and being able to taunt them that Regulus joined because he thought they’d be pleased—is Voldemort’s style.
If this is what happened, Regulus discovering the cave wasn’t part of the plan. (Otherwise he might have checked on his Horcrux.) Voldemort didn’t expect Kreacher to survive to tell anyone. I don’t know what the original plan was, though. Or whether Regulus ever worked out what the Dark Lord’s real plan for him was, and just didn’t tell Kreacher that part. Maybe he thought that Voldemort casually poisoning his house-elf and leaving him for dead meant he had the whole family in his sights. Probably Voldemort honestly didn’t realize the family valued Kreacher in their way and that an attack on Kreacher was an attack on the family—but Regulus might have hit upon the correct conclusion even with faulty evidence.
You have to wonder what Voldemort thought happened to Regulus, since he apparently didn’t know Regulus went to the cave. That he’d decided he didn’t like the Death Eater lifestyle and had quietly committed suicide? That he’d “disappeared” while in Auror custody? And whatever Voldemort thought, did he deliberately spread the story that he’d personally killed Regulus, or is that just what Sirius incorrectly guessed had happened? Or maybe it was Dumbledore’s guess. Order members are always ready to believe his “shrewd guesses.”
But I’m awfully curious now just what Voldemort might have had against Orion’s branch of the Black family. What did they know or do?
Except… Draco wasn’t exactly a typical case, was he? He’d been assigned a mission inside the school, while most Death Eaters were expected to operate in the wider world. More importantly, Voldemort fully expected Draco to fail: he’d either be killed, sent to Azkaban, or give Voldemort an excuse to kill him. Draco’s assignment was Voldemort’s punishment to Lucius for losing the Diary and botching the Ministry raid. Draco was never important in himself. (Not even after his unexpected success. Does it look like Voldemort valued Draco’s service after he proved his relative competence? Because it looked to me like he was just enjoying tormenting the whole family all year.) So we probably shouldn’t use Draco as an example of Voldemort’s normal recruiting practice.
There’s another complication: sixteen-year-olds are not of age. They’re sharply limited in how much magic they can perform outside of school. They can probably get away with doing magic inside the homes of adult witches and wizards and in exclusively wizarding districts like Hogsmeade and the London Alleys. But they can’t, say, Apparate to join Muggle-baiting parties in Muggle areas. And they can’t Apparate to meet their master in an overgrown graveyard or haunted cave or wherever when he summons them without getting caught either. (Unless an older Death Eater side-alongs them everywhere, I suppose, and they never use their wands in Muggle areas. But then what’s the point of including them?) Oh, and of course they’re stuck at school most of the year, which limits them even more. That’s also true of the seventeen-year-olds.
There also might be downsides to having actual Death Eaters hanging out in school for a year or more. Not the Dark Mark, which I’m pretty sure can be hidden. But your group will lose a lot of mystique if instead of (barely) adults who are out living what the kids imagine to be exciting lives, your members are those guys in the next dorm room who never wash their socks and think fart noises are hilarious. Kind of makes joining look less glamorous, you know? It also might not be a great plan to give your followers long stretches of time away from you and further orders to think about what they’ve done. Keeping them fully involved, so they don’t have a chance to catch their breaths and get perspective, seems preferable. And of course you have to worry that Dumbledore might catch on. You know, Dumbledore: your arch-nemesis who also happens to be a Legilimens? It’s one thing if he notices that some students think the Death Eaters sound cool, and quite another if he notices some have already joined and might be worth interrogating.
So, while schoolkids might occasionally be able to join in violent mayhem, their opportunities to do so were rare and often risky. Probably more trouble than it was worth in most cases. They’ll still be gullible and easy to recruit at eighteen; better to tantalize them with the possibility of joining while they’re in school and wait until they’ve just left to reel them in. Or at least until they are just about to, if he wants to make sure they won’t get caught up in new jobs and such and cool on the idea before he can mark them. Spring break of seventh year, maybe.
Unless, of course, they’re so individually valuable that he wants to make sure he gets them as soon as possible, for reasons other than how good they are with curses. Barty Junior might have been one such. Even if he could only report tiny scraps of information he picked up from his father, getting such a good spy and potential assassin locked in early seems worth the risk. And if he manages to pass on something genuinely useful while he’s still in school, well, there’s no going back once he’s committed treason, is there? No way out for Barty. But this is speculative. Barty might have taken the Mark at eighteen, perhaps no more than a couple of months before Voldemort got vaporized.
Even assuming Voldemort did mark exceptionally valuable followers who were underage, did Regulus have that kind of value? Not as far as we know. His family was important, yes. His grandfather had influence at the Ministry and an Order of Merlin. But we don’t even know if Arcturus had a seat on the Wizengamot or any other actual position. Could Regulus have given the Death Eaters information or influence they couldn’t get any other way? And we just never heard about it?
Maybe. And maybe Regulus joining was the key to convincing Barty to join, if they were friends. Or maybe Voldemort just took a “collect them all” approach and didn’t much care if they weren’t useful for a few years. But we don’t know of any reason Regulus should be individually valuable, or that Voldemort should have thought it so crucial to risk recruiting kids in fifth or sixth year instead of waiting another year or two.
Which takes us back the Draco scenario: did Voldemort have a reason to want Regulus to end up in a sticky situation?
Well. Sirius does tell us that his father put every protection known to wizardkind on their house. Orion and Walburga probably weren’t afraid of the Ministry, or at least not to that extent. They (or at least Orion’s dad) were pals with the Ministry. So who does that leave?
(Okay, maybe they were quaking in their boots at the thought that their renegade son might lead the Order of the Phoenix to their doorstep. Assuming they’d heard of the Order, which is by no means certain. But this doesn’t strike me as terrible likely.)
Even if we ignore the dodgy dates on the tapestry sketch, we’d wonder whether Orion Black—whose eldest child was born in late 1959—might have been the right age to have overlapped with Tom Riddle at school. Unless Orion was a very old or very young father, they must have been in the same generation. So, was he one of the few people who knew Tom was Voldemort? Had he once joined Tom, and then got cold feet and decided to hide? Or was there some other reason he might have believed Voldemort would be after the family?
If you do consider the tapestry sketch, you really have to wonder why Orion died in 1979. He probably wasn’t openly murdered by Death Eaters or Voldemort. Even Sirius probably would have mentioned that. Maybe Orion just died in one of the dragon pox epidemics which seem to have killed off half the grandparents in the series. But it’s awfully suspicious timing.
Orion may have expected an attack, and thought that Regulus was safe as long as he was at Hogwarts or in the heavily-protected family home. He didn’t realize until too late that Voldemort might attack by recruiting Regulus. And recruiting the family’s beloved son with the ultimate goal of setting him up for a terrible fate to punish the family—and being able to taunt them that Regulus joined because he thought they’d be pleased—is Voldemort’s style.
If this is what happened, Regulus discovering the cave wasn’t part of the plan. (Otherwise he might have checked on his Horcrux.) Voldemort didn’t expect Kreacher to survive to tell anyone. I don’t know what the original plan was, though. Or whether Regulus ever worked out what the Dark Lord’s real plan for him was, and just didn’t tell Kreacher that part. Maybe he thought that Voldemort casually poisoning his house-elf and leaving him for dead meant he had the whole family in his sights. Probably Voldemort honestly didn’t realize the family valued Kreacher in their way and that an attack on Kreacher was an attack on the family—but Regulus might have hit upon the correct conclusion even with faulty evidence.
You have to wonder what Voldemort thought happened to Regulus, since he apparently didn’t know Regulus went to the cave. That he’d decided he didn’t like the Death Eater lifestyle and had quietly committed suicide? That he’d “disappeared” while in Auror custody? And whatever Voldemort thought, did he deliberately spread the story that he’d personally killed Regulus, or is that just what Sirius incorrectly guessed had happened? Or maybe it was Dumbledore’s guess. Order members are always ready to believe his “shrewd guesses.”
But I’m awfully curious now just what Voldemort might have had against Orion’s branch of the Black family. What did they know or do?
no subject
Date: 2021-03-17 11:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-03-17 11:55 pm (UTC)Did he think that okay, the elf survived, but--as one would expect if house-elves are as universally Stockholmed as Voldemort might think (he's never met Dobby)--he obviously had no objection to being poisoned if he's still trying to help My Side? (Because of course it's about Voldemort, not the Black family.) And then Regulus disappearing shortly afterward was, er, coincidence. That would be careless of Voldemort not to follow up on. But he had a lot on his mind, and he barely even thought about the elf he poisoned at the time and that was ages ago, and he spent over a decade barely holding his vapor-self together in the meantime, so maybe that lapse is understandable.
Or was Narcissa vaguer about the source? Maybe he thought it was a portrait (presumably Narcissa inherited the mate to Orion's from her own father) which could only pass on broad hints due to magical constraints. Though why would she be vague? Maybe she thinks Voldemort would believe an elf behind enemy lines would be unable to pass real information, only whatever he'd been ordered to say. (It's a trap!) She knows better, but has caught on that for some reason, the Dark Lord doesn't fully understand the nuances of rich pureblood life... (I wonder if Bellatrix went to her sister at some point after the Ministry battle to vent about the ridiculous lie the Potter boy told about the Dark Lord, and Narcissa went, "Hmm...")
no subject
Date: 2021-03-18 12:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-03-18 01:02 am (UTC)And I don't think Dobby ever claimed Narcissa ordered him to punish himself. Lucius and "the family" (which might still have included Abraxas at that point), but not Narcissa. She might unhesitatingly do what she could to protect the family house-elf (as long as her husband wasn't the one he needed protecting from)--as Regulus did the minute he realized Voldemort hurt Kreacher. (He failed, but might not have realized how hard it was to destroy a Horcrux. He might well have thought Kreacher could destroy the thing and get his revenge, and then Voldemort would inevitably die in the war and everyone else would live happily ever after.)
no subject
Date: 2021-03-18 02:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-03-18 10:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-03-22 07:54 pm (UTC)To most purebloods house-elves seem to be like vending machines- no matter how you treat them, they give you what you want. So if you don't interact on a daily basis with the slave, why would you even bother with remembering their name?
no subject
Date: 2021-03-22 08:32 pm (UTC)No, I don't imagine Voldemort would bother remembering the name. If he ever thought about it at all, it was probably along the lines of "Well, if there's still a Black house elf, they obviously got a new one after their old one died, or maybe they had more than one to begin with." Or maybe Narcissa was vague by referring to "one my aunt's house elves". But I guess that would require her to know at least some of Regulus' story instead of just protecting Kreacher/a family elf on principle.
But even if Voldemort thought it was the same one, why wouldn't he trust him? He apparently never suspected that Regulus turned against him, and he knows that he didn't kill him. It would be reasonable for him to assume the aurors or the order did it, which would just give Kreacher more reason to betray them.