On Christmas Day 1745 the Jacobite army, footsore from the long retreat out of England, marched into Glasgow — and the city gave it the coldest welcome of the whole campaign. No bells, no bonfires, no recruits worth counting; the crowds turned out, as crowds will, to stare at the Highlanders and their Prince, and gave him, by every account, silence.
Charles Edward Stuart lodged in the finest house in town — the Shawfield Mansion, the tobacco-wealth palazzo whose site Glassford Street now covers — and set about the visit’s real business: his army was in rags, and Glasgow was a city of weavers and warehouses. The requisition was enormous and precise: twelve thousand linen shirts, six thousand cloth coats, six thousand pairs of shoes, six thousand bonnets, tartan hose by the thousand — the complete re-clothing of an army, delivered under threat and never paid for.
He tried charm as well as levy. The Prince dined publicly, dressed with famous care — the elegant figure in the silk tartan was long remembered — and on 2 January held a grand review of his re-equipped army on Flesher’s Haugh at Glasgow Green, the same common ground where the city’s other histories keep happening. Glasgow watched, counted his men — observers put the total lower than the Prince would have liked known — and remained unmoved. Charles’s own verdict became the visit’s epitaph: nowhere had he found so few friends. It is said only the intercession of Cameron of Lochiel spared the sullen city a sacking; Glasgow tradition long held that the bells were rung ever after when a Cameron chief came to town.
One thread of romance did survive the frost. Among the gentry the Prince met that season was Clementina Walkinshaw — a daughter of the Barrowfield and Camlachie family, whose town connections included the very Shawfield circle that hosted him. Years later, in exile, she joined him as his mistress and bore his only child, Charlotte, Duchess of Albany; the affair’s beginning is traditionally set in this Glasgow winter.
On 3 January 1746 the army marched for Stirling, taking Glasgow’s cloth and leaving its opinions exactly where it found them. A fortnight later the city’s own militia was being cut up at Falkirk; by spring the cause was ash at Culloden — and Glasgow was left holding the best true story ever told against romance: the day Bonnie Prince Charlie came to town, and the town looked back, unimpressed.