Choosing a Secret-Keeper
While I feel increasing sympathy for anyone who did not wholly trust Albus Dumbledore, the Marauders (and possibly Lily) were arrogant fools not to have used him as their Secret-Keeper.
Severus’s analysis of the situation, while logical from the information he had at the time, was not accurate. He conceived James’s mistake to have been that he was “too arrogant to believe [he] might be mistaken in Black” after Severus had risked death and torture to get Dumbledore the information that the suspected spy in the Order was a Marauder. So Severus thought James was risking Lily’s life and the baby’s on a one-in-three gamble over which it was, which of course Severus would never have done.
And of course from Sev’s point of view Sirius was the obvious suspect from the start. Sirius was the Marauder who had attempted at sixteen attempted to murder Severus, using his friend Remus as the murder weapon, thus showing himself to be both a ruthless killer and willing to betray his own friends. (Sev had no reason at all to buy Sirius’s lame explanation that he had expected Severus to walk into an enclosed space containing a transformed werewolf and come out again frightened but unscathed.) Severus must have felt on 11/1/81 that all his suspicions had been justified, that if Albus had sent Sirius to Azkaban at sixteen Lily would be alive now, and that James’s trusting Sirius to be Secret-Keeper had been insanity as well as arrogance. Had James been so cocky he simply couldn’t believe anyone would betray Mr. Popularity, or did he have so much overconfidence in his own judgment of Sirius’s character?
But Sev was, in fact, wrong in this analysis.
First, Sirius’s best friends DO credit that, however bright Sirius might be, he is so convinced of his ability to control consequences that he really, truly, never imagined-or subsequently understood, however hard they tried to explain the matter to him-that the most probable result of his little prank, had James not intervened, was NOT a scared-shitless Snivellus, but a dead one, and a werewolf and instigator condemned (to Azkaban at best) as his murderers. So whatever their opinions of Sirius’s judgment, Sirius’s friends never believed that he either intended to betray Remus or willed to kill someone who clearly had done nothing to deserve death.
The other piece of information Severus was missing is that James, Sirius, and Peter had gotten together and decided who the traitor was, and had started leaving him out of their confidences. So they thought they were taking into account Dumbledore’s hard-won, and hard-accepted, knowledge that one of the Marauders was a traitor.
Now, I take leave to point out that it sheds a VERY unflattering light upon James and Sirius that they unhesitatingly believed the traitor in their group to be the one who had sometimes ineffectually shown disapproval of James and Sirius’s worst excesses of bullying and endangering others. An arse-licker who went along with any indecency, and who openly reveled in the pain and humiliation of others, was trusted implicitly; someone who occasionally balked at his friends’ worst violations, but who ultimately put his friends ahead of his conscience, was not?
It’s not that I feel one should trust Remus unreservedly-he plainly is unworthy of trust. But-to trust Peter ahead of him? Who puts confidence in a sycophant-coward ahead of a weakling-who-has-a-moral-code-but-daren’t-enforce it? (I speak here as a sometime-Remus.)
Either that or the werewolf was automatically suspect because of his condition, when push came to shove. So much for the Marauders’ famous tolerance.
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But still, we do have to understand James and Sirius’s decision in light of the fact that they did firmly believe Moony to be the traitor. However harshly we may judge them for that belief.
So James did sincerely believe that there was no possible risk of deliberate treason in using either Peter or Sirius as Secret-Keeper.
So why was it still a stupid and arrogant decision to use Peter instead of Dumbledore?
Suppose the other three Marauders had been right. Moony had joined Voldemort, was a deliberate traitor to the Order and to his closest friends. So they would feed Moony misinformation, which would make its way to his new Master-ooh, clever of them, right?
And by the way, note that they apparently never told the head of the Order that they had figured out who the traitor was. They were handling this on their own. (I infer this from the fact that they left Albus in the dark about the switch itself.)
Suppose Peter to have been pristinely loyal to his first friends. But he was the weakest (magically) of the four. This is emphasized-the whole clever plan by which the Marauders hoped to fool Voldemort rested on the fact that Peter could not be expected to resist interrogation, should the Death Eaters ever capture him. That’s why no one would expect him to be Secret-Keeper.
Now, we don’t know how exactly the Fidelius works. The Secret is hidden unless the Secret-Keeper chooses to divulge it, fine. The Devil is in the details, as always.
What counts as choice?
The Marauders thought the choice of Peter a clever decoy because he was weak. I.e., a WEAK Secret-keeper, taken by Voldemort, could have been forced to divulge the Potter’s location-not by deliberate betrayal, but because he can’t hold out.
Maybe it’s the case that the Fidelius charm doesn’t allow absolutely coerced revelation. Had the Dark Lord cast Imperius or used Veritaserum to bypass the will, perhaps he couldn’t hear or use what the compelled victim said, just as, we are told, he could press his nose against the window of the right house and not see those whom he sought.
However, it’s clear from the Marauders’ reasoning that if a Secret-Keeper were captured and physically tortured, and s/he broke and begged for mercy, that would count as a choice to release the Secret.
It’s not whether you WANT to betray your friends, whether you like the idea, it’s whether you CHOOSE to.
But there are other ways, in the WW, of-encouraging the unburdening of information.
If the Dark Lord used Legilimency to tear the victim’s mind apart, could he take the information that way?
Maybe that would count still as compulsion and be magically ineffective. What about trickery or playing on (artificially-induced) emotions to make the Secret-Keeper willing to tell?
The Dark Lord could use Amortencia to make the Secret-Keeper so desperate for his favor that s/he would tell any secret.
Or if that didn’t work, he could cast the Confundus Charm. “You promised Lily to let Alice Longbottom know where the Potters are, so that she could bring Neville over for a play date with Harry. Remember? I’m Alice. Tell me.”
So it seems to me to be foolish in the extreme to expect anyone, once captured, to be able to avoid eventually divulging the desired information. We saw with Bertha that even Obliviation wasn’t a full solution.
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So the Marauders’ brilliant plan was to set Peter up as Secret-Keeper in hiding with Sirius as Decoy, playing Hide and Seek (or, possibly, Tag) with the Death Eaters.
How well would that have worked, had Peter in fact been loyal?
Well, it would have worked for minutes. Maybe hours. Maybe days. Until Sirius, the decoy, got himself captured. Maybe even for a little while after.
Sirius knew the plan, and he knew where Peter was hiding. [That’s what got Sirius concerned that Halloween-he went to check on Peter, and Peter wasn’t there.]
Oopsie.
Once Sirius was captured, the plan depended on Sirius the Strong holding out against Legilimency, torture, and any tricks the Dark Lord could play. Sirius was a great Occlumens, but even if I concede that Gryffindor Sirius, unlike most everyone in real life, could endure physical torture indefinitely without breaking, what about tricks?
Once Sirius divulged that Peter was Secret-Keeper and where he was hiding, the Death Eaters would have been swarming Peter’s rat hole-and none of the Marauders pretended to believe that Peter could hold out long at all against the Dark Lord’s pressure.
So the only way their scheme had any chance of working was if Sirius could evade capture indefinitely, or if he could withhold information indefinitely in captivity. And it was foolish and arrogant in the extreme to assume either of those things.
The boys’ scheme allowed them to hug themselves with glee over how they were outsmarting Voldemort by making him chase after Sirius instead of the real Secret-Keeper. But all it would have actually gained the Potters had it worked perfectly was, maybe, a little bit of time to serve as warning. If James found out Sirius were caught, he’d know the Death Eaters would soon be after Peter, and shortly after that on his doorstep. So he’d have a little extra time to implement the family’s emergency evacuation plan.
Except that it was clear they didn’t have one. And besides, there’s no guarantee that James would learn of Sirius’s capture in time to do the Potters any good.
So what was the alternative? Use as Secret-Keeper the head of the Order. If Dumbledore were ever captured by the enemy and eventually forced to divulge his various Secrets, the Order was lost anyhow. That’s boring, it’s not flashy, it doesn’t allow the boys to tweak Voldemort’s nose, but it’s foolproof. (Unless someone wants to argue that the Potters so distrusted Albus that they expected him to deliberately betray them.)
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A final note on Lily’s role in this. There are three main alternatives I see right off. One, that she was in the midst of all the planning, and agreed with the boys about how clever the plan was and how much more fun it would be to do this than just to use Dumbledore as he’d suggested. If so, she, like James, chose the flashy plan over the foolproof one. Now, that she risked her own life in doing so is her prerogative; however, she also risked her baby’s. That strikes me as irresponsible.
Two, that James was an abusive husband and Lily was too cowed by then to question him: that’s the situation of my story “Liberacorpus.”
Three… the Marauders have a known history of betting other people’s lives on their ability to bring off an extreme risk; they spent years letting loose a werewolf despite “many” close calls, i.e. near-deaths to innocents. Lily has established no such track record. And James also has a history of lying to her-excuse me, of concealing information she’d consider both interesting and relevant. Sirius and Remus told us so: James concealed from her that he was continuing to hex Snape after she thought he’d stopped.
Did Lily even know that Dumbledore had offered himself as alternative Secret-Keeper? It did sound from her letter that James for a time had been out and about on Order business while she stayed home with Baby; his frustration at being “shut up” sounds of recent origin. Might they have resumed that pattern?
James might have declined Albus’s offer to be Secret-Keeper on behalf of both Potters, and never told Lily that the alternative had been offered. Look back at PoA: Fudge said that Albus told “James and Lily” to go into hiding and advised “them” to use the Fidelius Charm. Minerva, however, said, “James Potter told Dumbledore that Black would die rather than tell where they were, that Black was planning to go into hiding himself… and yet, Dumbledore remained worried. I remember him offering to be the Potters’ Secret-Keeper himself.” That suggests that Albus’s offer was made later, in a conversation to which Minerva was privy-at which Lily’s presence wasn’t mentioned. If she wasn’t there, do we know James ever told her of the offer?
So Lily may never have known that a safer Secret-Keeper was available.
The world will never know, but fanfic authors can have fun.