During the nineteenth century, a government had two choices when it no longer enjoyed the confidence of the House of Commons. It could resign, handing the administration over to whomever the Queen designated (her choice being restricted to at most a few major figures in the opposition), or it could ask the Queen to dissolve Parliament and issue writs for a general election. The first of these options has not been much used in the twentieth century, but the Victorian House of Commons could and did replace ministries in which it had lost confidence without suffering a dissolution. Indeed, during the early Victorian period, a government was considered to be responsible to Parliament, and if defeated early in the life of a Parliament, it was usually expected to resign and permit the formation of another Cabinet (Mackintosh 1962: 93–96). In the thirty-five years from 1832 to 1867, governments resigned as a consequence of sustaining defeats in the House of Commons on eight occasions (not counting the two resignations, in 1841 and 1859, which were direct results of general elections). Later in the century, however, the normal option for a defeated ministry shifted somewhat from resignation toward dissolution. In the fifty years after 1868, only three ministries that had lost the confidence of the House chose to resign (not counting the Gladstone ministry's attempt to resign in 1873); all the rest chose to dissolve.