Parliament and Parties 113

tician who consistently overestimated his own importance left
behind such masses of paper that the formal biography could
not be avoided.693

(C) PARLIAMENT AND PARTIES

Amongst the truly important developments of the century, we
must reckon the first appearance of undoubted modern parties,
a phenomenon which both reflected and provoked funda-
mental changes in the relation between the executive and the
representative assembly. It would be good to know more about
what actually went on in the commons, and the lords remain,
as usual, dark. However, Fraser has opened (no more) one of
the central themes by looking at cabinet control over the lower
house,689 Beales considers the position of the non-party man
in the first age of ascendant parties,700 and Cromwell, entitling
her piece misleadingly so as to suggest that the eighteenth-
century commons controlled the executive, runs swiftly over
a long period of parliamentary management.701 Venturing into
much the same area, Close firmly places the emergence of two
exclusive parties in the age of Melbourne and Peel.702 Ayde-
lotte, engaged for many years in the task of taking apart the
commons of the forties in order to glue them together again in
different patterns, has produced both progress reports warning
against rash conclusions, and some tentative analytical pieces
which build up a picture of controlling parties in the face of
which neither social nor economic interests determined the
alignment of members on even the most crucial issues of the

*M James Pope-Hennessy, Lord Crewc* 1858-1945. L: Constable:
1955- Pp- xvii> 205.

*89 Peter Fraser, *The growth of ministerial control in the nineteenth-
century house of commons3, EHR 75 (1960), 444-63.

780 Derek E. D. Beales, 'Parliamentary parties and the "indepen-
dent" member*, Kitson Clark Ft (n. 137), 1-19.

701 Valerie Cromwell, 'The losing of the initiative by the house of
commons, 1780- 1914*, TRHS (1968), 1-24.

788 David Close, *The formation of the two-party alignment in the
house of commons between 1832 and 1841*, EHR 84 (1969),