Walpole's administration lasted long enough to give room for some feeble expression of this feeling. When George I. was succeeded by George II. (1727), Walpole remained in power. His eagerness for the possession of that power which he desired to use for his country's good, together with the incapacity of two kings born and bred in a foreign country to take a leading part in English affairs, completed the change which had been effected when William first entrusted the conduct of government to a united cabinet. There was now for the first time a prime minister in England, a person who was himself a subject imposing harmonious action on the cabinet. The change was so gradually and silently effected that it is difficult to realize its full importance. So far, indeed, as it only came about through the incapacity of the first two kings of the house of Hanover, it might be undone, and was in fact to a great extent undone by a more active successor. But so far as it was the result of general tendencies, it could never be obliterated. In the ministries in which Somers and Montagu on the one hand and Harley and St John on the other had taken part, there was no prime minister except so far as one member of the administration dominated over his colleagues by the force of character and intelligence. In the reign of George III., even North and Addington were universally acknowledged by that title, though they had little claim to the independence of action of a Walpole or a Pitt. The change was, in fact, one of the most important of those by which the English constitution has been altered from an hereditary monarchy with a parliamentary regulative agency to a parliamentary government with an hereditary regulative agency. In Walpole's time the forms of the constitution had become, in all essential particulars, what they are now. What was wanting was a national force behind them to set them to their proper work. The Opposition. War with Spain.