Bill. Chaplin was an ardent supporter of the Ulster Unionists in their opposition to the Bill during the 1914 crisis, believing that Home Rule would be the first step towards imperial disintegration. Upon the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, Chaplin supported the stance took by H. H. Asquith and congratulated Margot Asquith on her husband's speech that announced Britain's entry into the conflict. When the Conservatives entered into a coalition with the Liberal government in 1915, Chaplin became the leader of an Opposition in the House of Commons that offered friendly criticism. He held his seat in the Commons until 1916, when he was raised to the peerage as Viscount Chaplin, of Saint Oswald's, Blankney, in the County of Lincoln. He believed that the emergency wartime measures taken by the government to ensure the supply of food had vindicated his protectionist beliefs, writing in April 1917 of "the vital need to go back to the old system and grow most of our food here in the future". During the political crisis of autumn 1922, Chaplin, along with other "Die Hards", was opposed to the Conservatives remaining in the coalition government headed by David Lloyd George. On 19 October, he tried to attend the Carlton Club meeting of Conservative MPs that decided to end the coalition but he was refused admittance because he was a peer. Five days later he wrote to a leading supporter of the coalition, Austen Chamberlain: "What did you was the Coalition!! From many letters I received I was almost sure it would be fatal. Far and away the greatest man in my time was Disraeli and he stated...“England loves not Coalitions”." Chaplin's personality enabled him to make friends across the political spectrum, and after his death the Labour MP George Lansbury wrote in the Daily Herald: "Our best friends were the late Henry Chaplin, Lord Long and Gerald Balfour; they all, at least, tried to understand us". His Conservative colleague Walter Long said Chaplin was "a fine speaker of the old-fashioned school, and delivered many great “orations” from his place in Parliament, and was one of the most deservedly popular men that ever lived". Chaplin's friend Lord Willoughby de Broke said he possessed a geniality and kindliness that contributed to his popularity: The English public in fact have always recognised in him a manifestation of an ideal they have been seeking, a