21 July 1914-Buckingham Palace Conference on the Irish Home Rule Bill Begins

King-Emperor George V, King of the United
Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland,
Emperor of India, 1910-1935
By the summer of 1914 the “Irish Question” had reached a boiling point in the United Kingdom. Parliament, controlled by the Liberal Party of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, had passed an Irish Home Rule Bill. Previous Home Rule bills had passed when the LIberals were in control of the House of Commons, but they had always been vetoed by the Conservative-dominated House of Lords. The Parliamentary Reform bill of 1911 had severely curtailed the Lord’s veto powers, so the Home Rule Bill had passed and gained the Royal Assent by the summer of 1914. The bill would allow for Ireland to govern itself with regards to internal affairs, which in any other territory granted dominion status would not have been a problem. Ireland was different.
The province of Ulster, also known as Northern Ireland, had a Protestant majority with strong ties to the British Union of England and Ireland. A Home Rule bill would give power to Ireland’s Catholic majority, severely curtailing the power of the Protestant majority in Ulster. Catholics in Ireland, along with those Protestants who cherished independence above loyalty to the Union, insisted that all of Ireland, Ulster included, had to be included in the newly semi-independent Ireland of Home Rule. Ulster insisted that it have the right to opt out and remain tied to the United Kingdom. Both sides were arming themselves with illegally smuggled weapons, alarming both King George V and Prime Minister Asquith. There was a strong possibility that the UK could be torn apart by civil war over Ireland.
King George, who had spent a great deal of time in Cork as a naval officer, felt that if he got all the parties together at Buckingham Palace, some sort of compromise could be reached without resorting to violence. He summoned the Ulster representatives, those who wanted Home Rule, and Prime Minister Asquith to Buckingham Palace for a conference on 21 July, 1914. The conference went on for 3 days without any concrete resolution, but tempers among the Irish nationalists and Unionists were cooled. An agreement in principle was also reached that if Ulster were to opt out, the entire province would leave, not just certain counties. Tempers were still running hot, but they began to cool as the crisis of World War I began to heat up on 24 July, 1914.