While all these causes seemed tending to set up a great crisis, the King and Queen, with Princess Mary, had been spending a busy week in Scotland (July 6-13). Making Holyrood Palace their headquarters, they paid a state visit to Glasgow (July 7) where the King laid the foundation-stone of the new Municipal Buildings, opened a new block at the Royal Infirmary, and were received at the University; next day they visited the Fairfield shipbuilding yard at Govan, where His Majesty walked underneath the hull of the super-Dreadnought _Valiant_, in course of construction, and visited H.M.S, _Benbow_, completing; the day following they witnessed the stages of manufacture of the 15-inch gun at Parkhead Steel Works, visited Lord Newlands (who marked the occasion by giving 25,000_l._ to the Western Infirmary) and the Duke of Hamilton; next day they visited Dundee and Perth, and on the Saturday Dunblane Cathedral, Stirling Castle, and the ruined ancient palace of Linlithgow. On the Sunday they attended service at St. Giles's Cathedral, Edinburgh, and on Monday returned to London. Everywhere they were enthusiastically welcomed, and, save for the few futile militant interruptions, the visit was an entire success. The King, as the _Spectator_ remarked, was enabled by these visits to know his own country better than the best informed of his subjects. However, less pleasant matters were soon to engage His Majesty's attention. The "historic Twelfth" was approaching, in Ulster; the Ulster Unionist Council was to take the opportunity of meeting (July 10); and on the previous day Captain Craig, M.P., made a statement, in the course of which he read the preamble to the Constitution of the Ulster Provisional Government. This document declared that, trusting to Divine aid, the signatories, "the people of the counties and places of Ulster represented in the Ulster Unionist Council," undertook to resist to the utmost the claims of an Irish Nationalist Government to exercise powers over them hitherto exercised by the Crown and the Imperial Parliament, and resolved to ignore the Irish Parliament, and to assume and exercise within the Ulster area, pending the restoration of direct Imperial Government, all powers rendered necessary by the withdrawal of such Government for the maintenance of peace and order and the protection of the rights and liberties of His Majesty's subjects; but such powers were to be exercised in allegiance to the King and in trust for the Constitution, to the intent that the Ulster area should continue an integral portion thereof. The laws in force, other than the Home Rule Act, would be maintained and all judges and others acting under the direct authority of the King protected. After contrasting the aims of the Nationalist and of the Ulster leaders, Captain Craig added that the outlook was as dark as it could be. This view was emphasised by the landing of machine guns for the Ulstermen, and of consignments