Did Professor Slughorn Screw Over His Students to Survive the Battle of Hogwarts Himself?
Oh, you bet Horace Slughorn was not going to die during the Battle of Hogwarts! The cunning Potions master ensured he’d have the best chances against the Death Eaters.
Introduced in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Horace Slughorn has always been a pretty divisive character. On the one hand, no one in their right mind would call him a bad person; on the other hand, Slughorn’s cowardly and secretive nature took its toll in the form of many people’s lives in not one, but two Wizarding Wars.
Funnily enough, the subtle detail we noticed in The Deathly Hallows - Part 2 is not going to give a definitive answer to the Professor’s ambiguous nature. If anything, it will only strengthen your confusion when it comes to judging the old man!
As you remember, the most peculiar potion Professor Slughorn showed his student was Felix Felicis, aka Liquid Luck. Thanks to the Half-Blood Prince’s book, Harry won the competition for it and then used Liquid Luck against Slughorn himself to learn his darkest secret. Later, Harry gave this potion to Dumbledore's Army so they could survive the Death Eaters’ attack.
But surely, Harry wasn’t the only one who thought of using Felix Felicis to give himself plot armor in dangerous battles! Horace Slughorn himself did it, too.
In The Deathly Hallows - Part 2, right before the Battle of Hogwarts, you can see Professor Slughorn downing a vial of some potion. After that, the Potions master, who was not famous for being a duelist in the slightest, fought alongside Kingsley Shacklebolt and Minerva McGonagall and survived the battle without a scratch.
We bet there was Liquid Luck in that vial — but that’s not the main question.
Using Felix Felicis before such a dangerous battle was an undeniably smart move by Professor Slughorn, though we can’t help but ask ourselves: why didn’t he share? Surely, such a cunning and prudent man as Horace Slughorn had way more than just one tiny vial of Liquid Luck stored somewhere safe — he even hinted at it before.
So once again, we can’t make up our minds about Professor Slughorn. Was he a genius for remembering to drink Felix Felicis before the Battle of Hogwarts? Of course, he was. But was it possible for him to only have one tiny vial of it — or did he deliberately not share Liquid Luck with others for some reason? We don’t know.
Either way, one thing is clear: Horace Slughorn was a model Slytherin.