In Ulster the new order of things was accepted with acquiescence rather than with enthusiasm.  But the warmer emotion was immediately called forth when it became known that His Majesty the King had decided to open the Ulster Parliament in person on the 22nd of June, 1921, especially as it was fully realised that, owing to the anarchical condition of the country, the King’s presence in Belfast would be a characteristic disregard of personal danger in the discharge of public duty.  And when, on the eve of the royal visit, it was intimated that the Queen had been graciously pleased to accede to Sir James Craig’s request that she should accompany the King to Belfast, the enthusiasm of the loyal people of the North rose to fever heat.

At any time, and under any circumstances, the reigning Sovereign and his Consort would have been received by a population so noted for its sentiment of loyalty to the Throne as that of Ulster with demonstrations of devotion exceeding the ordinary.  But the present occasion was felt to have a very special significance.  The opening of Parliament by the King in State is one of the most ancient and splendid of ceremonial pageants illustrating the history of British institutions.  It was felt in Ulster that the association of this time-honoured ceremonial with the baptism, so to speak, of the latest offspring of the Mother of Parliaments stamped the Royal Seal upon the achievement of Ulster, and gave it a dignity, prestige, and promise of permanence which might otherwise have been lacking.  No city in the United Kingdom had witnessed so many extraordinary displays of popular enthusiasm in the last ten years as Belfast, some of which had left on the minds of observers a firm belief that such intensity of emotion in a great concourse of people could not be exceeded.  The scene in the streets when the King and Queen drove from the quay, on the arrival of the royal yacht, to the City Hall, was held by general consent to equal, since it could not surpass, any of those great demonstrations of the past in popular fervour.  At any rate, persons of long experience in attendance on the Royal Family gave it as their opinion in the evening that they had never before seen so impressive a display of public devotion to the person of the Sovereign.

Two buildings in Belfast inseparably associated with Ulster’s stand for union, the City Hall and the Ulster Hall, were the scenes of the chief events of the King’s visit.  The former, described by one of the English correspondents as “easily the most magnificent municipal building in the three Kingdoms,"[108] was placed at the disposal of the Ulster Government by the Corporation for temporary use as a Parliament House.  The Council Chamber, a fine hall of dignified proportions with a dais and canopied chair at the upper end, made an appropriate frame for the ceremony of opening Parliament, and the arrangements both of the Chamber itself and of the approaches and entrances to it made it a simple matter to model the procedure as closely as possible on that followed at Westminster.