The Effectiveness of the Order of the Phoenix
In my post “No Hostages for Harry,” I noted that the Order of the Phoenix did not, shall we say, provide a shining example of successful guerrilla resistance to Tom’s takeover of the WW. Of course, by then the Order had lost its peerless leader. And despite arranging for his own death, that leader had made no provision for an effective successor, nor left the group any instructions except “Harry is our best hope. Trust him.”
So, how effective was the Order before they lost the inestimable advantage of Dumbledore’s leadership?
At the beginning of OotP, Harry was given a description of the Order and its immediate overall objectives. He also learns, in time, of specific missions given to individual members.
What were those objectives, and how well did the Order succeed at fulfilling them in the period between the Order’s recall at the end of GoF and Dumbledore’s death or the Ministry’s fall?
Here’s OotP, Chapter Four, on the Order’s objectives:
“We know some of the Order are following known Death Eaters, keeping tabs on them, you know-” (Objective 1)
“-some of them are working on recruiting more people to the Order-” said Hermione. (2)
‘-and some of them are standing guard over something,” said Ron. “They’re always talking about guard duty.” (Objectives 3- guarding Harry; and 4-guarding the Department of Mysteries)
…
“Charlie’s in the Order too,” said George, “but he’s still in Romania. Dumbledore wants as many foreign wizards brought in as possible, so Charlie’s trying to make contacts on his days off.” (personal mission falling under objective 2)
And Chapter Five:
“So what’s the Order been doing,” said Harry, looking around at them all.
“Working as hard as we can to make sure Voldemort can’t carry out his plans.”
“How d’you know what his plans are?” Harry asked quickly.
“Dumbledore’s got a shrewd guess,” said Lupin, “and Dumbledore’s shrewd ideas normally turn out to be accurate.”
“So what does Dumbledore reckon he’s planning?”
“Well, firstly, he wants to build up his army again,” said Sirius. “In the old days he had huge numbers at his command; witches and wizards he’d bullied or bewitched into following him, his faithful Death Eaters, a great variety of Dark creatures. You heard him planning to recruit the giants; well, they’ll be just one group he’s after. He’s certainly not going to try and take on the Ministry of Magic with only a dozen Death Eaters.”
“So you’re trying to stop him getting more followers?” (5)
“We’re doing our best,” said Lupin.
“How?”
“Well, the main thing is to try to convince as many people as possible that You-Know-Who really has returned, to put them on their guard,” said Bill. (6)
…
“in any case, gathering followers is only one thing he’s interested in, he’s got other plans too, plans he can put into operation very quietly indeed, and he’s concentrating on them at the moment.”
“What’s he after apart from followers?” Harry asked swiftly….
“Stuff he can only get by stealth…. Like a weapon. Something he didn’t have last time.” (We’re at Objective 4 again-but notice that Twinkles has misled his own followers about why it’s important to keep Voldie out of the DoM.)
So on those six stated objectives, how’d the Order do?
Objective One: Shadow known DE’s and find out what they are doing for their master.
Results: We’ve no information on this. For anything we know, this one was a wild success, and there was nothing Tom’s agents did in the time period covered by OotP that was unknown to Albus. However ineffective Albus was in stopping any of it.
Hey, it’s possible! As the saying goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Objective Two: To recruit as many new people to the Order as possible.
Results: Albus recruited Molly (who’d apparently always supported Dumbledore but not actually joined the Order) and Bill immediately after “the parting of the ways.” They at once brought in most of their nuclear family; only Percy refusing to join the family’s Dumbledore/Harry cult.
We may also infer that Albus recruited Minerva almost immediately. (She was not present in Moody’s photo, and she was dismissed, with Poppy, before Padfoot was revealed as Sirius, so she presumably wasn’t part of the “old crowd”-though I gather Jo’s ret-conning that on Pottermore. Still, if anything her having already been a member from before strengthens the argument I intend to make.) Albus apparently either did not attempt or was not successful in recruiting any of his other staff. We know that Slughorn later refused categorically to join and was told staff didn’t have to, and we know that at the end of OotP, the Trio believed Minerva, Hagrid, and Severus to be the only Order members on Hogwarts staff.
It was probably retired Auror Moody who recruited current Aurors Kingsley and Tonks-before Harry’s removal to 12 Grimmauld Place, as they were in his Advance Guard. Moody, of course, could have told his fellows the truth about his own experiences: I was captured by not one, but two, wizards whom we had believed to have been dead, and Pettigrew’s survival proves that the boy is NOT lying or raving, but rather that the Ministry is covering up Sirius’s innocence and their own miscarriage of justice, as well as Voldemort’s return. (We readers remember, of course, that it might well have been Albus who was responsible for part of this cover-up as far as the general public is concerned. However, we can infer that all of the “old crowd” had been told privately about Sirius’s loyalty to the Order, since Albus sent Sirius as the emissary to alert them at the end of GoF.) But it seems only those two Aurors credited Mad-Eye and Albus’s crazy story; no other Aurors appeared later performing Order duties.
Bill at some point recruited Fleur. We know also that two of the places used as safe houses in the Seven Potters adventure belonged to family of Order members (Molly’s Aunt Muriel and Tonks’s parents), but we don’t see those three relatives otherwise participating in Order activities.
Everyone else we saw at headquarters or who was mentioned (as a guard in OotP, in the DoM and first Hogwarts fights, and in 7P) was one of “the old crowd” except Hestia Jones (who was in the Advance Guard in OotP, but whether as a new recruit or returning member we don’t know). Named survivors (as of the beginning of OotP) of “the old crowd” were Black, Diggle, Doge, both Dumbledores, Figg, Fletcher, Hagrid, Lupin, Moody, Podmore, Snape, and Vance.
Which gives us 21 named members in the reconstituted Order before Fleur’s induction, in line with the “about 20” the kids saw tramping through headquarters at various times. If there were more, as the kids believed, we have no evidence for them.
So the “intensive recruiting” engaged in after our (and Harry’s) first introduction to the Order (by which time the “old crowd” had been augmented by the Weasleys, Minerva, Tonks, Kingsley, and possibly Jones), netted, to our knowledge: one witch. And she a foreigner who simply adopted her husband’s politics (and who, as a Triwizard entrant, had already demonstrated uncommon courage-or recklessness).
So it seems that if you weren’t Dumbledore’s man automatically upon his parting of ways with the Ministry, the Order was utterly ineffective at persuading you to join them.
*
Objective Three: Guard Harry at the Dursleys’
(Or rather, watch for when Harry leaves the Dursleys’ physical residence to wander the neighborhood, shadow him when he does, and be ready to protect him from any temptations to perform magic, from the Death Eaters, and from Voldemort himself).
(Somehow, one feels sure that this particular task had never been described in all fullness to Dung when he agreed to take it on. We saw what happened the one time Dung DID face Death Eaters in combat, and Fletcher’s reactions on that occasion were more a tribute to Dung’s sense than to his courage.)
Results: Albus assigned Dung a rotation in this all-important task, and Dung took off to commit a crime. Harry was nearly soul-sucked by Dementors and nearly expelled for using his wand in self-defense. Had Tom or, worse, MacNair or Rowle shown up, the results might well have been much worse, and the series three books shorter.
However, under Moody’s leadership the Order did successfully escort Harry to 12 Grimmauld. And the last action that we saw the Order take in canon before they (along with the students, most of Hogsmeade, the centaurs, the house elves, and Grawp) showed up for the final confrontation at Hogwarts was (again successfully, again under Moody’s leadership) spiriting the Dursleys and Harry away from Little Whinging.
Objective Four: Guard the Department of Mysteries, which held something Voldemort wanted
Note that Dumbledore didn’t tell his followers WHAT exactly they were guarding or why it was important; Sirius seemed as sincere as Harry in thinking that it must be some super-weapon which Voldemort would want to get his paws on before he made his overt move against the WW.
Results: One innocent bystander (Bode) killed; Sturgis Podmore sent to Azkaban; Arthur Weasley almost killed. No Order member present when Harry’s group snuck in.
Actually, the lack of an Order guard when the kids got there might suggest that perhaps there had been at least one more nameless Order member who’d been killed before the kids’ arrival. Or perhaps it was Dung’s turn, and Lucius sent him a message about another “business opportunity”…. It’s rather too bad that Vance’s sensational murder was so strongly suggested to have been part of the Prime Minister’s (and MoM’s) “bad week” in mid-July; had the string of terrorist events been described as their ‘bad month,’ Emmeline could have been the DoM guard that night, ambushed and killed, and her body left near 10 Downing as the beginning of Tom’s new terror campaign.
Having Emmeline be the guard that night might still work, if we imagine that the DE’s kidnapped her rather than killing her outright. Kidnapping the Order guard as soon as the Ministry was otherwise empty would kill two (or three) Snidgets with one spell, as it were. It would clear the way for Harry to reach the Prophecy, obtain a source to cross-check Snape’s information on the Order, and have a tortured soon-to-be-corpse at hand for when Tom was ready to make a splash with some well-publicized “nasty” murders.
All this, however, is speculation. What is canon is that that the Order as a whole was ineffective in guarding the DoM. There was no Order guard who stopped the kids from entering or who raised the alarm when the DE’s appeared on the scene. According to Albus himself (and who would question him?), it was solely due to Severus that the cavalry arrived (barely) in time to save the kids.
Without Severus’s deduction of what the kids were up to when Severus registered that they’d not returned from the forest, and without Severus’s instructing the London-based members of the Order to go to the DoM to save the blasted children from their own folly, Harry and his friends would have been entirely without support at the DoM. And Harry would have handed over the prophecy to Lucius (for what that was worth), and it’s highly likely that the Dementor-addled Azkaban escapees would have played with the kiddies before the DE’s all went home to Tom with the prophecy and a captive (or dead) Harry, mission satisfactorily accomplished all around.
Objective Six: get the word out as widely as possible that Voldemort was back.
(I’m addressing this before Objective Five, because the Order said success at keeping Voldemort from recruiting was partly contingent on persuading people he was back.)
Results: According to the Order itself, many of them were valueless in working towards this goal because they were pariahs in the WW whose word would not be credited (Figg the Squib, Hagrid the half-giant, Lupin the werewolf, Black and Fletcher the criminals). However, those who worked respectably for the Ministry needed to serve as spies, and in order to keep their cover could not seem still to support Dumbledore or believe Harry.
Who did that leave, and how effective were they?
Dumbledore himself, of course, but he’d been largely discredited in the public mind, and the Prophet won’t print his Cassandra-like warnings.
Er-Molly the housewife? Whose children hadn’t socialized with anyone outside their nuclear family until Hogwarts, and who therefore, presumably, is herself not on social terms with anyone much outside her immediate family? And who, er, might impact her husband’s stalled career (further) if she was too vehement now?
And Doge, Albus’s brown-noser for the past centennium?
How effective were they at achieving this goal? Well, at the beginning of the school year Harry was shunned by dormmate Seamus. When Hermione started the DA, perhaps six months after the Order re-formed, most joining were from Harry’s year and house. But it accepted students from years 2 (Dennis Creevey) through 7 (Angelina), and from 3 of the 4 houses. That’s about 180 eligible kids, of whom 29 joined, or about 17%. Some joined initially to show their admiration for Harry (the Creeveys) and/or disapprobation of the Ministry (the Weasleys), some because they wanted to practice Defense spells before their OWLS (Terry), some hoping finally to hear Harry’s story (Zach and Cho), some just to support a friend (Marietta) or girlfriend (Michael).
We don’t know of a SINGLE PERSON, out of 180 potential recruits, who joined because their family had decided, based on the Order’s diligent propagandizing for six months, that the Ministry was wrong in denying that Voldemort had returned. At best we saw a few who choose to believe in Harry himself-either on general principles or after they’d heard what little he was willing to say.
And when Harry himself went public in the Quibbler with his experience (upon Hermione’s insistence and arrangement, not upon Dumbledore’s suggestion, nor that of anyone in the Order), it did more good than everything everyone formally in the Order (including its illustrious founder) put together did, to persuade at least some people that Voldemort had returned.
So, no, we have no evidence that the Order persuaded anyone that Voldemort had returned.
And indeed, what could they say?
I trust Dumbledore, who the Prophet has been telling you has finally gone senile, and he believes Harry Potter’s story, which, uh, no, neither Dumbledore nor Harry have actually repeated to me in any detail. Just that You-Know-Who IS back. From death. Take their words for it!
What’s that about Harry Potter? Well, yes, it is true that for years the boy has been having fainting fits, screaming nightmares, and psychosomatic pain at random moments. It’s also true he claims to have dreams and visions of Voldemort though he’s flunking Divination, and that he talks to snakes. And it’s true that for years Dumbledore has been hushing up these matters…. But anyhow, I trust him, I trust them both, even though they won’t tell me what really happened that night, and so should you!
(By the way, note that the only people who heard Harry’s story directly were Dumbledore himself and Sirius. Who, was, a) wildly unlikely to talk about it to ANYONE while he knew Harry didn’t want it spoken of, and, b) on the Kill (or have Kissed) First/Ask Questions Later list for all of Wizarding Britain except the Order itself. As long as Harry didn’t talk, no one knew anything except what information Albus released.
And releasing information is not exactly one of Albus’s strengths, is it?)
Objective Five: Keep the Death Eaters from Recruiting.
Results: According to the Order itself, effectiveness at that had a prerequisite: effectiveness at objective six. Which was nonexistent. We don’t know how well the Death Eaters did overall at recruiting and/or Imperiusing people during OotP, and therefore can’t judge whether the Order provided any impediment at all. We do, however, have at least four named Death Eaters in the later books whose names come up in none of the canon listings (Sirius’s, the Pensieves, Albus’s to Tom, Severus’s to Bellatrix) of known or suspected Death Eaters as of 1981: Rowle, Selwyn, Gibbon, and Jugson. And we know that Lucius Malfoy successfully Imperiused Bode to attempt to take the Prophecy during the time the Order was actively trying to stop such activities, and that Draco Imperiused Rosmerta under Dumbledore’s very nose.
And of course the Ministry fell, in the end, because of Yaxley’s success in Imperiusing the Head of Magical Law Enforcement.
Certainly there was a circle of “at least thirty” Death Eaters, including Shunpike, greeting the 7 Potters gang before the Ministry takeover-a respectable increase over the “dozen” Harry and Sirius talked about in OotP before the breakout of the Azkaban Ten. (Moreover, if your actual objective were to keep Riddle from increasing the number of his active agents, keeping him from springing those ten-effectively almost doubling the number of his marked followers!-ought to have been included in this objective.)
Finally, the first time we actually saw anyone in the Order make any attempt at all to keep the Death Eaters from recruiting children was Albus on the tower with Draco-a trifle belated, one might think. Where were the Order members pointing out to impressionable youths that joining You-Know-Who bought his servants slavery and torture when he was in the ascendant, disgrace or death when he was not? We know the two reasons why Severus could not tell his students that; why was no one else trying to point out the obvious?
Missions given to a single Order member:
Finally, what came of the individual assignments that we know of? Hagrid and Madam Maxime, sent to woo the giants; Remus, thrown to the wolves; Charlie, on his days off in Romania, trying to recruit foreign wizards to Dumbledore’s cause; Severus, sent back to Tom as a quadruple agent trying to persuade Tom he’s a triple agent. How’d all that work out for them?
Well, we never saw a single foreigner join the fight against Voldemort save Fleur, and it was hardly Charlie who recruited her. Hagrid reported that his mission was a miserable failure; Remus confessed the same. Only Severus was successful, at least in persuading Tom of his loyalty; we don’t know how useful his information-passing was, though Harry did observe the other Order members hanging on Snape’s words.
But really, consider Hagrid’s and Remus’s missions a little more closely. If it is certain that Voldemort is planning to recruit giants (as in, Harry heard Tom explicitly say so), it makes sense for the Ministry to consider offering the giants certain concessions to join its side instead-or at least to stay out of things. And if one knows/suspects that Voldemort plans to recruit other “dark” creatures, the same might go for werewolves. And presumably for vampires, hags, Acromantulae…. and indeed for goblins, centaurs, and any other magical Beings and thinking Beasts who might have reason to resent their current treatment by British wizards and witches and wonder if a Death Eater administration might be more sympathetic.
A ”magic-first” regime, after all, might well proclaim that Acromantulae, werewolves, vampires, and the like have a natural right to prey upon Muggles and their spawn. Just not on (pureblood) wizards.
So it would make sense for the Ministry to consider offering concessions to non-humans to secure their alliance or neutrality. If it believed the danger of those Dark beings/creatures making common cause with Voldemort to be real.
For the Ministry to do so.
The Order is not the Ministry. Dumbledore is not the Minister.
Dumbledore turned down his chance to be Minister. Four times, at last count. He had no influence with the current Minister. (He’d lost it, in Fudge’s case; he never had any, in Scrimgeour’s.) He’d even lost his position on the Wizengamot for a time.
Voldemort intended to take over Wizarding Britain, and he wasn’t shy about saying so to potential allies. “Join me now, and when I’m in power you’ll see how Lord Voldemort rewards loyal service…. “
(Mind, what they might eventually “see” was a ‘reward’ comparable to that that reaped by Bartemius Junior, but that’s a separate issue.)
Dumbledore? He’s a has-been who’s lost what influence he once had in the highest circles. What can a high school principal offer anyone? Gurg, if you join me now, I’ll in my very twinkliest tone of voice ask Fudge (who can’t decide whether I’m a crazy old coot or power-mad enough to try destabilizing our entire society to usurp his position) to negotiate a new treaty allowing your people back in Britain?
Fenrir, I’ll use my influence with Scrimgeour (who won’t release the near-Squib Shunpike on my word) to beg him to ease the current restrictions on werewolves? How ‘bout I try to persuade the Ministry to offer Wolfsbane free to your people? That’s sure to appeal.
(Actually, it would. Hey, Fenrir, imagine how many more people you could infect if you were of sound mind after the change!)
Indeed, either Remus was entirely confused about his actual objective, he decided to lie to Harry about it, or he suffered “mission creep” in the field. First he told Harry he was among them to spy-and had failed at that. “Oh, I’ve been underground. Almost literally…. I’ve been living among my fellows, my equals…. Werewolves. Nearly all of them are on Voldemort’s side. Dumbledore wanted a spy and here I was… ready-made…. However, it has been difficult gaining their trust. I bear the unmistakable signs of having tried to live among wizards, you see, whereas they have shunned normal society and live on the margins….
“They think that, under his [Voldemort’s] rule, they will have a better life. And it is hard to argue with Greyback out there….
“I cannot pretend that my particular brand of reasoned argument is making much headway against Greyback’s insistence that we werewolves deserve blood, that we ought to revenge ourselves on normal people.” (HBP 16)
Reasoned argument? That’s not what an undercover spy engages in! At the end there Remus was suggesting he was there as an emissary trying to win them to Dumbledore’s side, as Hagrid had been among the giants.
Again, either Remus was seriously confused about his role, or he was misstating it to Harry, or it changed after his first failure.
However…. One can be simultaneously a spy and an emissary, but only if one approaches the matter first as the emissary-and therefore as a known and accepted spy. I mean, any government knows, and accepts, that all foreign embassy staff are presumably loyal first to their home countries and consider it a duty to report back on anything of interest. Any ambassador is by definition a spy-or less inflammatorily, an observer-for the foreign power. The local government expects that, and understands that it might therefore sometimes want to manage what emissaries are allowed to see.
But trying to undertake those roles IN REVERSE, to be first an undercover spy and then the formal emissary, which is what Remus made it sound like…. Umm. That might be a problem. Because one would be dealing with the fact that the others know that this “emissary” initiated relations by trying to trick and betray them.
Let’s be explicit here. After the other wolves had sniffed Remus out as a would-be spy, he was told instead to try to sweet-talk them into joining his master, who had, as it happens, nothing to offer them? Except, it appears, appeals to abstract ethics?
“It’s nicer not to bite people. Dumbledore says, think how much better you would feel about yourselves if every full moon you bit and scratched yourselves nearly to pieces in frustration instead of being free to chase joyously after human prey.
“(Of course, when I was actually in the position of being offered an unfettered choice, I myself chose the joyous chase every single month. Best times of my life, those were! But let’s ignore that skeleton in the Shrieking Shack, shall we? My master did, when he sent me on this mission to persuade you to do as I say, not as I did.)
“My message from my master is, Biting Isn’t Nice. And maybe if we start being Nice to Wizards, they might finally start being Nice back to us. Eventually. A little at least. Hey, it has to start somewhere! Maybe if we stop attacking wizards, they might give us soup-kitchen charity, if not allow us jobs.
“Yes, I know the Dark Lord offers you unlimited prey, and being feared, and being treated as a force to respect, while Dumbledore offers you self-torture, unrelieved poverty, and being ostracized and scorned by all right-thinking wizards But hey, you’d have the satisfaction of knowing in your hearts that you were Nice!
“Well, all right, mostly Nice. I admit, it perhaps wasn’t very Nice of me, to try to trick you into thinking I was one of you so I could pass your secrets on to Dumbledore and maybe get you killed by wizards. But I promise NOW only to pass on further information if you give me permission to, okay? And no, my fingers aren’t crossed, how can you say that?”
Yep, that message will go over well, whatever Fenrir’s rhetorical skills or the Dark Lord’s offers!
Finally, Hagrid said his and Madame Maxim’s instructions were to bring back some giants as allies of the Order.
To bring them back. To Britain. From which they’d been exiled. Banned, by treaty.
If Fudge was paranoid about twenty-odd children pledging loyalty to Dumbledore and training themselves in magical defense, what would he have thought about a contingent of giants showing up saying Dumbledore had invited them back? Or for that matter, a werewolf pack swearing they were Dumbs’s Dogs? Or even some Romanian dragon-wranglers showing up claiming they had come to fight at Dumbledore’s side?
In short, what was Albus thinking, even assigning Remus, Hagrid, and Charlie such missions? Success would have been worse for his cause than failure!
*
So.
What did the Order actually accomplish under the leadership of greatest and wisest wizard of their time?
Well, it did clean up Grimmauld Place to use as headquarters. Isn’t that important? An impregnable, untraceable building?
But in fact, ANY house belonging to an Order member (or freshly purchased) could have been put under Fidelius and used as Order HQ. Though no other building had (at that time, that we know) the nearly-impregnable layer of spells against invasion that Sirius’s family had invested in (cowardly Slytherins that they had been).
But on the other hand, few other buildings could have been so creature- and curse-infested, and presumably none other would have harbored an enemy slave who could only be precariously restrained by direct orders which he was constantly examining for loopholes. And no other place of confinement could have so surely sent Sirius into a funk over being imprisoned again.
Still, the Order did succeed in cleaning up Sirius’s house a bit. Cleanliness is next to godliness, remember; let’s give credit where it’s due! And they did succeed in getting Harry there safely (while Riddle was lying low, trying not to take any actions that might confirm his return, and trying to figure out what to do about his wand being twin to Harry’s). And they did increase their ranks by one person.
Anything else?
So, how effective was the Order before they lost the inestimable advantage of Dumbledore’s leadership?
At the beginning of OotP, Harry was given a description of the Order and its immediate overall objectives. He also learns, in time, of specific missions given to individual members.
What were those objectives, and how well did the Order succeed at fulfilling them in the period between the Order’s recall at the end of GoF and Dumbledore’s death or the Ministry’s fall?
Here’s OotP, Chapter Four, on the Order’s objectives:
“We know some of the Order are following known Death Eaters, keeping tabs on them, you know-” (Objective 1)
“-some of them are working on recruiting more people to the Order-” said Hermione. (2)
‘-and some of them are standing guard over something,” said Ron. “They’re always talking about guard duty.” (Objectives 3- guarding Harry; and 4-guarding the Department of Mysteries)
…
“Charlie’s in the Order too,” said George, “but he’s still in Romania. Dumbledore wants as many foreign wizards brought in as possible, so Charlie’s trying to make contacts on his days off.” (personal mission falling under objective 2)
And Chapter Five:
“So what’s the Order been doing,” said Harry, looking around at them all.
“Working as hard as we can to make sure Voldemort can’t carry out his plans.”
“How d’you know what his plans are?” Harry asked quickly.
“Dumbledore’s got a shrewd guess,” said Lupin, “and Dumbledore’s shrewd ideas normally turn out to be accurate.”
“So what does Dumbledore reckon he’s planning?”
“Well, firstly, he wants to build up his army again,” said Sirius. “In the old days he had huge numbers at his command; witches and wizards he’d bullied or bewitched into following him, his faithful Death Eaters, a great variety of Dark creatures. You heard him planning to recruit the giants; well, they’ll be just one group he’s after. He’s certainly not going to try and take on the Ministry of Magic with only a dozen Death Eaters.”
“So you’re trying to stop him getting more followers?” (5)
“We’re doing our best,” said Lupin.
“How?”
“Well, the main thing is to try to convince as many people as possible that You-Know-Who really has returned, to put them on their guard,” said Bill. (6)
…
“in any case, gathering followers is only one thing he’s interested in, he’s got other plans too, plans he can put into operation very quietly indeed, and he’s concentrating on them at the moment.”
“What’s he after apart from followers?” Harry asked swiftly….
“Stuff he can only get by stealth…. Like a weapon. Something he didn’t have last time.” (We’re at Objective 4 again-but notice that Twinkles has misled his own followers about why it’s important to keep Voldie out of the DoM.)
So on those six stated objectives, how’d the Order do?
Objective One: Shadow known DE’s and find out what they are doing for their master.
Results: We’ve no information on this. For anything we know, this one was a wild success, and there was nothing Tom’s agents did in the time period covered by OotP that was unknown to Albus. However ineffective Albus was in stopping any of it.
Hey, it’s possible! As the saying goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Objective Two: To recruit as many new people to the Order as possible.
Results: Albus recruited Molly (who’d apparently always supported Dumbledore but not actually joined the Order) and Bill immediately after “the parting of the ways.” They at once brought in most of their nuclear family; only Percy refusing to join the family’s Dumbledore/Harry cult.
We may also infer that Albus recruited Minerva almost immediately. (She was not present in Moody’s photo, and she was dismissed, with Poppy, before Padfoot was revealed as Sirius, so she presumably wasn’t part of the “old crowd”-though I gather Jo’s ret-conning that on Pottermore. Still, if anything her having already been a member from before strengthens the argument I intend to make.) Albus apparently either did not attempt or was not successful in recruiting any of his other staff. We know that Slughorn later refused categorically to join and was told staff didn’t have to, and we know that at the end of OotP, the Trio believed Minerva, Hagrid, and Severus to be the only Order members on Hogwarts staff.
It was probably retired Auror Moody who recruited current Aurors Kingsley and Tonks-before Harry’s removal to 12 Grimmauld Place, as they were in his Advance Guard. Moody, of course, could have told his fellows the truth about his own experiences: I was captured by not one, but two, wizards whom we had believed to have been dead, and Pettigrew’s survival proves that the boy is NOT lying or raving, but rather that the Ministry is covering up Sirius’s innocence and their own miscarriage of justice, as well as Voldemort’s return. (We readers remember, of course, that it might well have been Albus who was responsible for part of this cover-up as far as the general public is concerned. However, we can infer that all of the “old crowd” had been told privately about Sirius’s loyalty to the Order, since Albus sent Sirius as the emissary to alert them at the end of GoF.) But it seems only those two Aurors credited Mad-Eye and Albus’s crazy story; no other Aurors appeared later performing Order duties.
Bill at some point recruited Fleur. We know also that two of the places used as safe houses in the Seven Potters adventure belonged to family of Order members (Molly’s Aunt Muriel and Tonks’s parents), but we don’t see those three relatives otherwise participating in Order activities.
Everyone else we saw at headquarters or who was mentioned (as a guard in OotP, in the DoM and first Hogwarts fights, and in 7P) was one of “the old crowd” except Hestia Jones (who was in the Advance Guard in OotP, but whether as a new recruit or returning member we don’t know). Named survivors (as of the beginning of OotP) of “the old crowd” were Black, Diggle, Doge, both Dumbledores, Figg, Fletcher, Hagrid, Lupin, Moody, Podmore, Snape, and Vance.
Which gives us 21 named members in the reconstituted Order before Fleur’s induction, in line with the “about 20” the kids saw tramping through headquarters at various times. If there were more, as the kids believed, we have no evidence for them.
So the “intensive recruiting” engaged in after our (and Harry’s) first introduction to the Order (by which time the “old crowd” had been augmented by the Weasleys, Minerva, Tonks, Kingsley, and possibly Jones), netted, to our knowledge: one witch. And she a foreigner who simply adopted her husband’s politics (and who, as a Triwizard entrant, had already demonstrated uncommon courage-or recklessness).
So it seems that if you weren’t Dumbledore’s man automatically upon his parting of ways with the Ministry, the Order was utterly ineffective at persuading you to join them.
*
Objective Three: Guard Harry at the Dursleys’
(Or rather, watch for when Harry leaves the Dursleys’ physical residence to wander the neighborhood, shadow him when he does, and be ready to protect him from any temptations to perform magic, from the Death Eaters, and from Voldemort himself).
(Somehow, one feels sure that this particular task had never been described in all fullness to Dung when he agreed to take it on. We saw what happened the one time Dung DID face Death Eaters in combat, and Fletcher’s reactions on that occasion were more a tribute to Dung’s sense than to his courage.)
Results: Albus assigned Dung a rotation in this all-important task, and Dung took off to commit a crime. Harry was nearly soul-sucked by Dementors and nearly expelled for using his wand in self-defense. Had Tom or, worse, MacNair or Rowle shown up, the results might well have been much worse, and the series three books shorter.
However, under Moody’s leadership the Order did successfully escort Harry to 12 Grimmauld. And the last action that we saw the Order take in canon before they (along with the students, most of Hogsmeade, the centaurs, the house elves, and Grawp) showed up for the final confrontation at Hogwarts was (again successfully, again under Moody’s leadership) spiriting the Dursleys and Harry away from Little Whinging.
Objective Four: Guard the Department of Mysteries, which held something Voldemort wanted
Note that Dumbledore didn’t tell his followers WHAT exactly they were guarding or why it was important; Sirius seemed as sincere as Harry in thinking that it must be some super-weapon which Voldemort would want to get his paws on before he made his overt move against the WW.
Results: One innocent bystander (Bode) killed; Sturgis Podmore sent to Azkaban; Arthur Weasley almost killed. No Order member present when Harry’s group snuck in.
Actually, the lack of an Order guard when the kids got there might suggest that perhaps there had been at least one more nameless Order member who’d been killed before the kids’ arrival. Or perhaps it was Dung’s turn, and Lucius sent him a message about another “business opportunity”…. It’s rather too bad that Vance’s sensational murder was so strongly suggested to have been part of the Prime Minister’s (and MoM’s) “bad week” in mid-July; had the string of terrorist events been described as their ‘bad month,’ Emmeline could have been the DoM guard that night, ambushed and killed, and her body left near 10 Downing as the beginning of Tom’s new terror campaign.
Having Emmeline be the guard that night might still work, if we imagine that the DE’s kidnapped her rather than killing her outright. Kidnapping the Order guard as soon as the Ministry was otherwise empty would kill two (or three) Snidgets with one spell, as it were. It would clear the way for Harry to reach the Prophecy, obtain a source to cross-check Snape’s information on the Order, and have a tortured soon-to-be-corpse at hand for when Tom was ready to make a splash with some well-publicized “nasty” murders.
All this, however, is speculation. What is canon is that that the Order as a whole was ineffective in guarding the DoM. There was no Order guard who stopped the kids from entering or who raised the alarm when the DE’s appeared on the scene. According to Albus himself (and who would question him?), it was solely due to Severus that the cavalry arrived (barely) in time to save the kids.
Without Severus’s deduction of what the kids were up to when Severus registered that they’d not returned from the forest, and without Severus’s instructing the London-based members of the Order to go to the DoM to save the blasted children from their own folly, Harry and his friends would have been entirely without support at the DoM. And Harry would have handed over the prophecy to Lucius (for what that was worth), and it’s highly likely that the Dementor-addled Azkaban escapees would have played with the kiddies before the DE’s all went home to Tom with the prophecy and a captive (or dead) Harry, mission satisfactorily accomplished all around.
Objective Six: get the word out as widely as possible that Voldemort was back.
(I’m addressing this before Objective Five, because the Order said success at keeping Voldemort from recruiting was partly contingent on persuading people he was back.)
Results: According to the Order itself, many of them were valueless in working towards this goal because they were pariahs in the WW whose word would not be credited (Figg the Squib, Hagrid the half-giant, Lupin the werewolf, Black and Fletcher the criminals). However, those who worked respectably for the Ministry needed to serve as spies, and in order to keep their cover could not seem still to support Dumbledore or believe Harry.
Who did that leave, and how effective were they?
Dumbledore himself, of course, but he’d been largely discredited in the public mind, and the Prophet won’t print his Cassandra-like warnings.
Er-Molly the housewife? Whose children hadn’t socialized with anyone outside their nuclear family until Hogwarts, and who therefore, presumably, is herself not on social terms with anyone much outside her immediate family? And who, er, might impact her husband’s stalled career (further) if she was too vehement now?
And Doge, Albus’s brown-noser for the past centennium?
How effective were they at achieving this goal? Well, at the beginning of the school year Harry was shunned by dormmate Seamus. When Hermione started the DA, perhaps six months after the Order re-formed, most joining were from Harry’s year and house. But it accepted students from years 2 (Dennis Creevey) through 7 (Angelina), and from 3 of the 4 houses. That’s about 180 eligible kids, of whom 29 joined, or about 17%. Some joined initially to show their admiration for Harry (the Creeveys) and/or disapprobation of the Ministry (the Weasleys), some because they wanted to practice Defense spells before their OWLS (Terry), some hoping finally to hear Harry’s story (Zach and Cho), some just to support a friend (Marietta) or girlfriend (Michael).
We don’t know of a SINGLE PERSON, out of 180 potential recruits, who joined because their family had decided, based on the Order’s diligent propagandizing for six months, that the Ministry was wrong in denying that Voldemort had returned. At best we saw a few who choose to believe in Harry himself-either on general principles or after they’d heard what little he was willing to say.
And when Harry himself went public in the Quibbler with his experience (upon Hermione’s insistence and arrangement, not upon Dumbledore’s suggestion, nor that of anyone in the Order), it did more good than everything everyone formally in the Order (including its illustrious founder) put together did, to persuade at least some people that Voldemort had returned.
So, no, we have no evidence that the Order persuaded anyone that Voldemort had returned.
And indeed, what could they say?
I trust Dumbledore, who the Prophet has been telling you has finally gone senile, and he believes Harry Potter’s story, which, uh, no, neither Dumbledore nor Harry have actually repeated to me in any detail. Just that You-Know-Who IS back. From death. Take their words for it!
What’s that about Harry Potter? Well, yes, it is true that for years the boy has been having fainting fits, screaming nightmares, and psychosomatic pain at random moments. It’s also true he claims to have dreams and visions of Voldemort though he’s flunking Divination, and that he talks to snakes. And it’s true that for years Dumbledore has been hushing up these matters…. But anyhow, I trust him, I trust them both, even though they won’t tell me what really happened that night, and so should you!
(By the way, note that the only people who heard Harry’s story directly were Dumbledore himself and Sirius. Who, was, a) wildly unlikely to talk about it to ANYONE while he knew Harry didn’t want it spoken of, and, b) on the Kill (or have Kissed) First/Ask Questions Later list for all of Wizarding Britain except the Order itself. As long as Harry didn’t talk, no one knew anything except what information Albus released.
And releasing information is not exactly one of Albus’s strengths, is it?)
Objective Five: Keep the Death Eaters from Recruiting.
Results: According to the Order itself, effectiveness at that had a prerequisite: effectiveness at objective six. Which was nonexistent. We don’t know how well the Death Eaters did overall at recruiting and/or Imperiusing people during OotP, and therefore can’t judge whether the Order provided any impediment at all. We do, however, have at least four named Death Eaters in the later books whose names come up in none of the canon listings (Sirius’s, the Pensieves, Albus’s to Tom, Severus’s to Bellatrix) of known or suspected Death Eaters as of 1981: Rowle, Selwyn, Gibbon, and Jugson. And we know that Lucius Malfoy successfully Imperiused Bode to attempt to take the Prophecy during the time the Order was actively trying to stop such activities, and that Draco Imperiused Rosmerta under Dumbledore’s very nose.
And of course the Ministry fell, in the end, because of Yaxley’s success in Imperiusing the Head of Magical Law Enforcement.
Certainly there was a circle of “at least thirty” Death Eaters, including Shunpike, greeting the 7 Potters gang before the Ministry takeover-a respectable increase over the “dozen” Harry and Sirius talked about in OotP before the breakout of the Azkaban Ten. (Moreover, if your actual objective were to keep Riddle from increasing the number of his active agents, keeping him from springing those ten-effectively almost doubling the number of his marked followers!-ought to have been included in this objective.)
Finally, the first time we actually saw anyone in the Order make any attempt at all to keep the Death Eaters from recruiting children was Albus on the tower with Draco-a trifle belated, one might think. Where were the Order members pointing out to impressionable youths that joining You-Know-Who bought his servants slavery and torture when he was in the ascendant, disgrace or death when he was not? We know the two reasons why Severus could not tell his students that; why was no one else trying to point out the obvious?
Missions given to a single Order member:
Finally, what came of the individual assignments that we know of? Hagrid and Madam Maxime, sent to woo the giants; Remus, thrown to the wolves; Charlie, on his days off in Romania, trying to recruit foreign wizards to Dumbledore’s cause; Severus, sent back to Tom as a quadruple agent trying to persuade Tom he’s a triple agent. How’d all that work out for them?
Well, we never saw a single foreigner join the fight against Voldemort save Fleur, and it was hardly Charlie who recruited her. Hagrid reported that his mission was a miserable failure; Remus confessed the same. Only Severus was successful, at least in persuading Tom of his loyalty; we don’t know how useful his information-passing was, though Harry did observe the other Order members hanging on Snape’s words.
But really, consider Hagrid’s and Remus’s missions a little more closely. If it is certain that Voldemort is planning to recruit giants (as in, Harry heard Tom explicitly say so), it makes sense for the Ministry to consider offering the giants certain concessions to join its side instead-or at least to stay out of things. And if one knows/suspects that Voldemort plans to recruit other “dark” creatures, the same might go for werewolves. And presumably for vampires, hags, Acromantulae…. and indeed for goblins, centaurs, and any other magical Beings and thinking Beasts who might have reason to resent their current treatment by British wizards and witches and wonder if a Death Eater administration might be more sympathetic.
A ”magic-first” regime, after all, might well proclaim that Acromantulae, werewolves, vampires, and the like have a natural right to prey upon Muggles and their spawn. Just not on (pureblood) wizards.
So it would make sense for the Ministry to consider offering concessions to non-humans to secure their alliance or neutrality. If it believed the danger of those Dark beings/creatures making common cause with Voldemort to be real.
For the Ministry to do so.
The Order is not the Ministry. Dumbledore is not the Minister.
Dumbledore turned down his chance to be Minister. Four times, at last count. He had no influence with the current Minister. (He’d lost it, in Fudge’s case; he never had any, in Scrimgeour’s.) He’d even lost his position on the Wizengamot for a time.
Voldemort intended to take over Wizarding Britain, and he wasn’t shy about saying so to potential allies. “Join me now, and when I’m in power you’ll see how Lord Voldemort rewards loyal service…. “
(Mind, what they might eventually “see” was a ‘reward’ comparable to that that reaped by Bartemius Junior, but that’s a separate issue.)
Dumbledore? He’s a has-been who’s lost what influence he once had in the highest circles. What can a high school principal offer anyone? Gurg, if you join me now, I’ll in my very twinkliest tone of voice ask Fudge (who can’t decide whether I’m a crazy old coot or power-mad enough to try destabilizing our entire society to usurp his position) to negotiate a new treaty allowing your people back in Britain?
Fenrir, I’ll use my influence with Scrimgeour (who won’t release the near-Squib Shunpike on my word) to beg him to ease the current restrictions on werewolves? How ‘bout I try to persuade the Ministry to offer Wolfsbane free to your people? That’s sure to appeal.
(Actually, it would. Hey, Fenrir, imagine how many more people you could infect if you were of sound mind after the change!)
Indeed, either Remus was entirely confused about his actual objective, he decided to lie to Harry about it, or he suffered “mission creep” in the field. First he told Harry he was among them to spy-and had failed at that. “Oh, I’ve been underground. Almost literally…. I’ve been living among my fellows, my equals…. Werewolves. Nearly all of them are on Voldemort’s side. Dumbledore wanted a spy and here I was… ready-made…. However, it has been difficult gaining their trust. I bear the unmistakable signs of having tried to live among wizards, you see, whereas they have shunned normal society and live on the margins….
“They think that, under his [Voldemort’s] rule, they will have a better life. And it is hard to argue with Greyback out there….
“I cannot pretend that my particular brand of reasoned argument is making much headway against Greyback’s insistence that we werewolves deserve blood, that we ought to revenge ourselves on normal people.” (HBP 16)
Reasoned argument? That’s not what an undercover spy engages in! At the end there Remus was suggesting he was there as an emissary trying to win them to Dumbledore’s side, as Hagrid had been among the giants.
Again, either Remus was seriously confused about his role, or he was misstating it to Harry, or it changed after his first failure.
However…. One can be simultaneously a spy and an emissary, but only if one approaches the matter first as the emissary-and therefore as a known and accepted spy. I mean, any government knows, and accepts, that all foreign embassy staff are presumably loyal first to their home countries and consider it a duty to report back on anything of interest. Any ambassador is by definition a spy-or less inflammatorily, an observer-for the foreign power. The local government expects that, and understands that it might therefore sometimes want to manage what emissaries are allowed to see.
But trying to undertake those roles IN REVERSE, to be first an undercover spy and then the formal emissary, which is what Remus made it sound like…. Umm. That might be a problem. Because one would be dealing with the fact that the others know that this “emissary” initiated relations by trying to trick and betray them.
Let’s be explicit here. After the other wolves had sniffed Remus out as a would-be spy, he was told instead to try to sweet-talk them into joining his master, who had, as it happens, nothing to offer them? Except, it appears, appeals to abstract ethics?
“It’s nicer not to bite people. Dumbledore says, think how much better you would feel about yourselves if every full moon you bit and scratched yourselves nearly to pieces in frustration instead of being free to chase joyously after human prey.
“(Of course, when I was actually in the position of being offered an unfettered choice, I myself chose the joyous chase every single month. Best times of my life, those were! But let’s ignore that skeleton in the Shrieking Shack, shall we? My master did, when he sent me on this mission to persuade you to do as I say, not as I did.)
“My message from my master is, Biting Isn’t Nice. And maybe if we start being Nice to Wizards, they might finally start being Nice back to us. Eventually. A little at least. Hey, it has to start somewhere! Maybe if we stop attacking wizards, they might give us soup-kitchen charity, if not allow us jobs.
“Yes, I know the Dark Lord offers you unlimited prey, and being feared, and being treated as a force to respect, while Dumbledore offers you self-torture, unrelieved poverty, and being ostracized and scorned by all right-thinking wizards But hey, you’d have the satisfaction of knowing in your hearts that you were Nice!
“Well, all right, mostly Nice. I admit, it perhaps wasn’t very Nice of me, to try to trick you into thinking I was one of you so I could pass your secrets on to Dumbledore and maybe get you killed by wizards. But I promise NOW only to pass on further information if you give me permission to, okay? And no, my fingers aren’t crossed, how can you say that?”
Yep, that message will go over well, whatever Fenrir’s rhetorical skills or the Dark Lord’s offers!
Finally, Hagrid said his and Madame Maxim’s instructions were to bring back some giants as allies of the Order.
To bring them back. To Britain. From which they’d been exiled. Banned, by treaty.
If Fudge was paranoid about twenty-odd children pledging loyalty to Dumbledore and training themselves in magical defense, what would he have thought about a contingent of giants showing up saying Dumbledore had invited them back? Or for that matter, a werewolf pack swearing they were Dumbs’s Dogs? Or even some Romanian dragon-wranglers showing up claiming they had come to fight at Dumbledore’s side?
In short, what was Albus thinking, even assigning Remus, Hagrid, and Charlie such missions? Success would have been worse for his cause than failure!
*
So.
What did the Order actually accomplish under the leadership of greatest and wisest wizard of their time?
Well, it did clean up Grimmauld Place to use as headquarters. Isn’t that important? An impregnable, untraceable building?
But in fact, ANY house belonging to an Order member (or freshly purchased) could have been put under Fidelius and used as Order HQ. Though no other building had (at that time, that we know) the nearly-impregnable layer of spells against invasion that Sirius’s family had invested in (cowardly Slytherins that they had been).
But on the other hand, few other buildings could have been so creature- and curse-infested, and presumably none other would have harbored an enemy slave who could only be precariously restrained by direct orders which he was constantly examining for loopholes. And no other place of confinement could have so surely sent Sirius into a funk over being imprisoned again.
Still, the Order did succeed in cleaning up Sirius’s house a bit. Cleanliness is next to godliness, remember; let’s give credit where it’s due! And they did succeed in getting Harry there safely (while Riddle was lying low, trying not to take any actions that might confirm his return, and trying to figure out what to do about his wand being twin to Harry’s). And they did increase their ranks by one person.
Anything else?