Expecto Patronus: or How the Wizarding World Really Works (Part 4)
Patronage and ideology: Percy Weasley's search for a patron
Not that all these patronage networks are purely associations of convenience for survival and advancement in an insecure world. They all seem to have some sort of ideological basis. All the networks are "isolationist" in that they support a policy of non-interference in the Muggle world and Obliviation on a colossal scale to keep Muggles in the dark about what's going on. They're all remarkably casual about that, as is obvious from the scene with the Muggle landowner Mr Roberts at the Quidditch World Cup. Dumbledore's network is (probably) the most "progressive" - though not by Muggle standards, of course. It is all-embracing, and stands for co-operation between all kinds of magical peoples and wizards, regardless of their background and birth, and protecting Muggles from wizards as well - albeit in a sometimes patronising way. It's typified by Arthur Weasley, although Dumbledore has a greater understanding of Muggles (he even reads Muggle newspapers) and his personal views may be somewhat different. Barty Crouch understood Muggles too. Cornelius Fudge's new patronage network is not biased against Muggles or Muggle-born wizards, but is hostile to (and very fearful of) other non-wizarding magical people like goblins, centaurs and giants, even werewolves (and it probably has reason to fear them all, to be fair). Being almost entirely Ministry-based, it naturally believes very strongly in extending Ministry of Magic control wherever it possibly can. Its next target may well be the goblins, an ideal target: dangerous (and therefore feared), unpopular, ugly, disarmed and rich.
Percy Weasley's career so far makes a vivid illustration of how these patronage networks function - as well as the role of ideology in cementing them. He started off clearly in Dumbledore's camp, regarding his family's patron in much the same way that his siblings did.
"Mad?" said Percy airily. "He's a genius! Best wizard in the world! But he is a bit mad, yes. Potatoes, Harry?"
These words could have been spoken by Ron. In fact, Percy and Ron have a lot in common. Both had a lot to live up to, both resent their lack of importance and poverty, both are protective of younger siblings, and Ron's resentment and competition with Percy mirror Percy's behaviour to Arthur. Indeed, the best parallel with Percy's closing the door on his family is Ron's refusal to speak to Harry, though in Ron's case the motives were purely personal.
Percy saw himself as a high-flier, a former Head Boy at Hogwarts, destined for a successful Ministry career, and (hopefully) one of a line of "prefects who gained power." (In fact, I suspect that Percy in his night-time patrols as a prefect looked into the Mirror of Erised too, and, like Ron, was led astray by what he saw.) He seems to have felt as keenly as Ron the shame and disadvantage of poverty, something that never bothered Arthur - not even the fact that it bothered his children.
Percy was the only child to follow his father into the Ministry, but arrived at a time when the Dumbledore faction there (which by family tradition he should have been part of) was already starting to decline and clearly would not do much for him, and he seems to have been aware that too much association with his father would hurt him in the new political climate. His calculated risk in attaching himself to Crouch's declining patronage network paid off in the short run (in Crouch's "illness" Percy ended up running the entire Department of International Magical Cooperation) but it ended in disaster, with Crouch himself dead, along with his network, and Percy not only under a cloud (for not observing that there was something wrong with Crouch) but now without a patron as well.
So shortly afterwards he joined Cornelius Fudge's patronage network, an even greater gamble for Percy, because it created a breach with his family, (that he could be so fulsome in the praise of Dolores Umbridge proves they are now part of the same network - it recalls what he said about Mr Crouch) and he may have been only invited in so that Fudge could divide the "enemy." Anyway, through these short cuts, Percy manages to land some seemingly very important positions. He spent a year as Bartemius Crouch's personal assistant (and ran the Department in his absence) and he later became the junior assistant to the Minister of Magic himself. But in each case his position was vulnerable. It is a sign of insecurity that Percy always felt he had to publicly flatter his patron. He was continually praising Crouch while he served as his assistant - and boasting of his pull with a patron that didn't even remember his name right; the following year he had to protect his (far more insecure) position with Fudge by acting as a yes-man for him, pointedly laughing at his flattest jokes: "very good, Minister, oh very good." As the Polyjuice scene shows in Chamber of Secrets, this is precisely what Draco Malfoy expected and got from Crabbe and Goyle.
On the other hand, an exaggerated profession of admiration and loyalty is normal for any client to show to a patron, and very often comes from the heart. Percy's admiration for Crouch at least probably did. And the Dursleys could say the most appalling things to Hagrid about Harry's parents without making him lose his temper. But he risked Azkaban to punish the Dursleys when one of them criticised Albus Dumbledore.
Percy always adopts the ideology of his patrons: the strictness of Bartemius Crouch, and the anti-Dumbledore suspicions (and anti-Harry prejudice) of Fudge's coterie. Now, convenient as this was for his ambitions, he wasn't consciously cynical here. His very strictness as a prefect at school suggests that he already had some affinity with Crouch's public persona, and the prejudices he displays are merely a more extreme form of the ones he would have been brought up with. Ideologically, Percy was always closer to Molly than to Arthur, including in his trust in the Daily Prophet - even Molly briefly believed the Prophet's slander about Hermione. More conventional than his siblings, he's the most "respectable" of her children, and she valued that - perhaps because she was herself of a slightly lower social background than Arthur (as is clear from a lot of things: her choice of words, her fears and her tastes). In many ways it's not surprising that Percy chose to work for Crouch, and as for when he went over to Fudge, he saw the breach with his family in ideological terms. His father was backing a rogue patron: his own loyalty lay (as it should) with legitimate wizarding authority.
In other words, to Percy (with his love of order and rules) Fudge is admired not for himself (Percy criticises him often enough in earlier books) but as the personification of legitimate authority, for which he has a great deal more reverence than anyone else in his family, even his father. Percy has a genuine love of order, and that (at least as much as ambition) made a Ministry career something of a vocation for him. As Cornelius Fudge's junior assistant Percy is in a far more vulnerable position (and a dependent one, after his breach with his family and Dumbledore's network) than as Crouch's assistant, where he was entrusted with real authority, and he seems a great deal less at ease: his responses are far more exaggerated and artificial. Now, on one level this seems to be yet another example of the exaggerated and twisted behaviour to which almost everyone has been tempted since Voldemort regained his full powers, and also because Percy sees himself as being on sufferance after his mistake of the previous year - but he also looks as if he is putting on an act, and not an entirely convincing one other: his responses are a bit too contrived. In addition, his praise of Crouch was privately said to other people. What he says to Fudge is outright flattery to his face. It is the price of Percy's job.
The way Percy closed the door on his mother without speaking to her can be read on several levels: it isn't simply a cold-blooded decision to dissociate himself from people that could do him harm in his career - he still feels concern for his younger siblings, and he always identified most with his mother, the one person in his whole family who hasn't rejected him. He was actually the only one of her children to do all he could to become the sort of person she wanted him to be. But by dissociating himself from his family, Percy is actually avoiding a conflict of loyalties, the sort of position where he might be obliged to betray his parents, who, he believed, were siding with a rogue patronage leader who was plotting to take over the Ministry. His letter to Ron is full of worries that family would go down with Dumbledore, and that Ron himself would go down with Harry. In telling Ron to approach Umbridge, he was offering him a way into Fudge's patronage network, and in cutting off all links with his parents, he answered his father's accusation. Arthur had ordered Percy not to accept the job with Fudge (his last chance within the Ministry) on the grounds he had really been promoted simply in order to act as a spy. By cutting himself off from his family, Percy has effectively made it impossible for anyone to ask or expect him to spy on them, and thus has proved his father wrong.
Not that Percy had envisaged this breach (before his father's accusation) or even saw it as being final. There is ample evidence in almost every book that he genuinely does care for his family, something for which Ron in particular (Harry's chief source about Percy) never, ever gave him credit; he was the only person to notice Ginny's disquiet in Chamber of Secrets; he rushed into the lake on Ron and Ginny's rescue in Goblet of Fire, and his final letter to Ron, although smug, uncharitable, and completely lacking in judgement (common faults in Order of the Phoenix) does display a real concern for Ron and Ginny. Only Molly returns this affection, which makes his shutting the door on her all the more poignant; the others had all been put off by what they saw as his self-importance and pomposity, and now they will only take him back on terms that will humiliate him. The creepy thing is that the twins (and to some extent Ron, Bill and Ginny) had come to dislike him anyway, regarded his cherished beliefs (his love of order) with contempt, and actually thought they were "well rid of him" - the first in a series of coming tensions that could well break up the Weasley family. By the time of the final breach with his father Percy had effectively been excluded from the real life of his family, his place in their hearts and their lives stolen by Harry - which makes his very different attitude to Harry's story more understandable.
For Harry, Molly is the mother he never saw; Arthur can talk to him about Muggles; Ron's friend, Ginny's saviour, the twins' companion in mischief and patron, he's even Penelope's saviour too. Harry achieves without any effort what Percy tries so hard (too hard) to accomplish, and he's unknowingly stolen Percy's place in his family. Percy's distrust and resentment of Harry is far more excusable than Ron's behaviour in Goblet of Fire, and this time there was no Hermione able to act as a bridge between them.
In addition, the whole of the political elite seemed to be taking the same view of Harry that Percy does - and indeed, as time elapsed, with not the slightest evidence that Voldemort had returned, Harry's claims would have appeared all the more unbelievable. Moreover, until his father accused him of being hired as a spy, Percy had showed every indication of arguing the issue reasonably. He was correct in pointing out that the only evidence of Voldemort's return was the word of one person (Harry) whose sanity had been called into question, and unlike the rest of his family, Percy wasn't close to Harry, and actually had cause to resent him. Besides, Percy's view of Harry is far from the only instance of unwarranted distrust we see in Order of the Phoenix, now that Voldemort is back and exerting his corrosive power; it's a feature of most of the protagonists, and Percy's is more reasonable than many.
What will happen now is another matter. Percy undoubtedly expected to be vindicated, and his pride may make it hard for him to come back, especially to the gloating of Fred and George and the contempt of his other siblings; and the scale of Arthur's continuing anger may make their reconciliation difficult - not to mention the other tensions which are beginning to tear apart the whole Weasley family - with potentially fatal consequences for Dumbledore's and Harry Potter's patronage network. Molly has been under the most appalling pressure, and there are signs that she is about to crack.
The real question with regard to Percy is how far his political shifts have been caused by his beliefs, and how far he moulded his beliefs in order to suit his political ambitions. I suspect that both are to some extent true, with the former truest of his time with Crouch, and the latter of his alignment with Fudge. But his love of order remained throughout, and I very much doubt he was consciously cynical. He would not have lasted in either camp for long unless his beliefs could fit with those of his patron and fellow-clients. This is because all patronage networks have an ideology that binds them together - including that of Voldemort.
Continued in Part 5...
Not that all these patronage networks are purely associations of convenience for survival and advancement in an insecure world. They all seem to have some sort of ideological basis. All the networks are "isolationist" in that they support a policy of non-interference in the Muggle world and Obliviation on a colossal scale to keep Muggles in the dark about what's going on. They're all remarkably casual about that, as is obvious from the scene with the Muggle landowner Mr Roberts at the Quidditch World Cup. Dumbledore's network is (probably) the most "progressive" - though not by Muggle standards, of course. It is all-embracing, and stands for co-operation between all kinds of magical peoples and wizards, regardless of their background and birth, and protecting Muggles from wizards as well - albeit in a sometimes patronising way. It's typified by Arthur Weasley, although Dumbledore has a greater understanding of Muggles (he even reads Muggle newspapers) and his personal views may be somewhat different. Barty Crouch understood Muggles too. Cornelius Fudge's new patronage network is not biased against Muggles or Muggle-born wizards, but is hostile to (and very fearful of) other non-wizarding magical people like goblins, centaurs and giants, even werewolves (and it probably has reason to fear them all, to be fair). Being almost entirely Ministry-based, it naturally believes very strongly in extending Ministry of Magic control wherever it possibly can. Its next target may well be the goblins, an ideal target: dangerous (and therefore feared), unpopular, ugly, disarmed and rich.
Percy Weasley's career so far makes a vivid illustration of how these patronage networks function - as well as the role of ideology in cementing them. He started off clearly in Dumbledore's camp, regarding his family's patron in much the same way that his siblings did.
"Mad?" said Percy airily. "He's a genius! Best wizard in the world! But he is a bit mad, yes. Potatoes, Harry?"
These words could have been spoken by Ron. In fact, Percy and Ron have a lot in common. Both had a lot to live up to, both resent their lack of importance and poverty, both are protective of younger siblings, and Ron's resentment and competition with Percy mirror Percy's behaviour to Arthur. Indeed, the best parallel with Percy's closing the door on his family is Ron's refusal to speak to Harry, though in Ron's case the motives were purely personal.
Percy saw himself as a high-flier, a former Head Boy at Hogwarts, destined for a successful Ministry career, and (hopefully) one of a line of "prefects who gained power." (In fact, I suspect that Percy in his night-time patrols as a prefect looked into the Mirror of Erised too, and, like Ron, was led astray by what he saw.) He seems to have felt as keenly as Ron the shame and disadvantage of poverty, something that never bothered Arthur - not even the fact that it bothered his children.
Percy was the only child to follow his father into the Ministry, but arrived at a time when the Dumbledore faction there (which by family tradition he should have been part of) was already starting to decline and clearly would not do much for him, and he seems to have been aware that too much association with his father would hurt him in the new political climate. His calculated risk in attaching himself to Crouch's declining patronage network paid off in the short run (in Crouch's "illness" Percy ended up running the entire Department of International Magical Cooperation) but it ended in disaster, with Crouch himself dead, along with his network, and Percy not only under a cloud (for not observing that there was something wrong with Crouch) but now without a patron as well.
So shortly afterwards he joined Cornelius Fudge's patronage network, an even greater gamble for Percy, because it created a breach with his family, (that he could be so fulsome in the praise of Dolores Umbridge proves they are now part of the same network - it recalls what he said about Mr Crouch) and he may have been only invited in so that Fudge could divide the "enemy." Anyway, through these short cuts, Percy manages to land some seemingly very important positions. He spent a year as Bartemius Crouch's personal assistant (and ran the Department in his absence) and he later became the junior assistant to the Minister of Magic himself. But in each case his position was vulnerable. It is a sign of insecurity that Percy always felt he had to publicly flatter his patron. He was continually praising Crouch while he served as his assistant - and boasting of his pull with a patron that didn't even remember his name right; the following year he had to protect his (far more insecure) position with Fudge by acting as a yes-man for him, pointedly laughing at his flattest jokes: "very good, Minister, oh very good." As the Polyjuice scene shows in Chamber of Secrets, this is precisely what Draco Malfoy expected and got from Crabbe and Goyle.
On the other hand, an exaggerated profession of admiration and loyalty is normal for any client to show to a patron, and very often comes from the heart. Percy's admiration for Crouch at least probably did. And the Dursleys could say the most appalling things to Hagrid about Harry's parents without making him lose his temper. But he risked Azkaban to punish the Dursleys when one of them criticised Albus Dumbledore.
Percy always adopts the ideology of his patrons: the strictness of Bartemius Crouch, and the anti-Dumbledore suspicions (and anti-Harry prejudice) of Fudge's coterie. Now, convenient as this was for his ambitions, he wasn't consciously cynical here. His very strictness as a prefect at school suggests that he already had some affinity with Crouch's public persona, and the prejudices he displays are merely a more extreme form of the ones he would have been brought up with. Ideologically, Percy was always closer to Molly than to Arthur, including in his trust in the Daily Prophet - even Molly briefly believed the Prophet's slander about Hermione. More conventional than his siblings, he's the most "respectable" of her children, and she valued that - perhaps because she was herself of a slightly lower social background than Arthur (as is clear from a lot of things: her choice of words, her fears and her tastes). In many ways it's not surprising that Percy chose to work for Crouch, and as for when he went over to Fudge, he saw the breach with his family in ideological terms. His father was backing a rogue patron: his own loyalty lay (as it should) with legitimate wizarding authority.
In other words, to Percy (with his love of order and rules) Fudge is admired not for himself (Percy criticises him often enough in earlier books) but as the personification of legitimate authority, for which he has a great deal more reverence than anyone else in his family, even his father. Percy has a genuine love of order, and that (at least as much as ambition) made a Ministry career something of a vocation for him. As Cornelius Fudge's junior assistant Percy is in a far more vulnerable position (and a dependent one, after his breach with his family and Dumbledore's network) than as Crouch's assistant, where he was entrusted with real authority, and he seems a great deal less at ease: his responses are far more exaggerated and artificial. Now, on one level this seems to be yet another example of the exaggerated and twisted behaviour to which almost everyone has been tempted since Voldemort regained his full powers, and also because Percy sees himself as being on sufferance after his mistake of the previous year - but he also looks as if he is putting on an act, and not an entirely convincing one other: his responses are a bit too contrived. In addition, his praise of Crouch was privately said to other people. What he says to Fudge is outright flattery to his face. It is the price of Percy's job.
The way Percy closed the door on his mother without speaking to her can be read on several levels: it isn't simply a cold-blooded decision to dissociate himself from people that could do him harm in his career - he still feels concern for his younger siblings, and he always identified most with his mother, the one person in his whole family who hasn't rejected him. He was actually the only one of her children to do all he could to become the sort of person she wanted him to be. But by dissociating himself from his family, Percy is actually avoiding a conflict of loyalties, the sort of position where he might be obliged to betray his parents, who, he believed, were siding with a rogue patronage leader who was plotting to take over the Ministry. His letter to Ron is full of worries that family would go down with Dumbledore, and that Ron himself would go down with Harry. In telling Ron to approach Umbridge, he was offering him a way into Fudge's patronage network, and in cutting off all links with his parents, he answered his father's accusation. Arthur had ordered Percy not to accept the job with Fudge (his last chance within the Ministry) on the grounds he had really been promoted simply in order to act as a spy. By cutting himself off from his family, Percy has effectively made it impossible for anyone to ask or expect him to spy on them, and thus has proved his father wrong.
Not that Percy had envisaged this breach (before his father's accusation) or even saw it as being final. There is ample evidence in almost every book that he genuinely does care for his family, something for which Ron in particular (Harry's chief source about Percy) never, ever gave him credit; he was the only person to notice Ginny's disquiet in Chamber of Secrets; he rushed into the lake on Ron and Ginny's rescue in Goblet of Fire, and his final letter to Ron, although smug, uncharitable, and completely lacking in judgement (common faults in Order of the Phoenix) does display a real concern for Ron and Ginny. Only Molly returns this affection, which makes his shutting the door on her all the more poignant; the others had all been put off by what they saw as his self-importance and pomposity, and now they will only take him back on terms that will humiliate him. The creepy thing is that the twins (and to some extent Ron, Bill and Ginny) had come to dislike him anyway, regarded his cherished beliefs (his love of order) with contempt, and actually thought they were "well rid of him" - the first in a series of coming tensions that could well break up the Weasley family. By the time of the final breach with his father Percy had effectively been excluded from the real life of his family, his place in their hearts and their lives stolen by Harry - which makes his very different attitude to Harry's story more understandable.
For Harry, Molly is the mother he never saw; Arthur can talk to him about Muggles; Ron's friend, Ginny's saviour, the twins' companion in mischief and patron, he's even Penelope's saviour too. Harry achieves without any effort what Percy tries so hard (too hard) to accomplish, and he's unknowingly stolen Percy's place in his family. Percy's distrust and resentment of Harry is far more excusable than Ron's behaviour in Goblet of Fire, and this time there was no Hermione able to act as a bridge between them.
In addition, the whole of the political elite seemed to be taking the same view of Harry that Percy does - and indeed, as time elapsed, with not the slightest evidence that Voldemort had returned, Harry's claims would have appeared all the more unbelievable. Moreover, until his father accused him of being hired as a spy, Percy had showed every indication of arguing the issue reasonably. He was correct in pointing out that the only evidence of Voldemort's return was the word of one person (Harry) whose sanity had been called into question, and unlike the rest of his family, Percy wasn't close to Harry, and actually had cause to resent him. Besides, Percy's view of Harry is far from the only instance of unwarranted distrust we see in Order of the Phoenix, now that Voldemort is back and exerting his corrosive power; it's a feature of most of the protagonists, and Percy's is more reasonable than many.
What will happen now is another matter. Percy undoubtedly expected to be vindicated, and his pride may make it hard for him to come back, especially to the gloating of Fred and George and the contempt of his other siblings; and the scale of Arthur's continuing anger may make their reconciliation difficult - not to mention the other tensions which are beginning to tear apart the whole Weasley family - with potentially fatal consequences for Dumbledore's and Harry Potter's patronage network. Molly has been under the most appalling pressure, and there are signs that she is about to crack.
The real question with regard to Percy is how far his political shifts have been caused by his beliefs, and how far he moulded his beliefs in order to suit his political ambitions. I suspect that both are to some extent true, with the former truest of his time with Crouch, and the latter of his alignment with Fudge. But his love of order remained throughout, and I very much doubt he was consciously cynical. He would not have lasted in either camp for long unless his beliefs could fit with those of his patron and fellow-clients. This is because all patronage networks have an ideology that binds them together - including that of Voldemort.
Continued in Part 5...