The ’Fifteen found Glasgow’s loyalties freshly minted and surprisingly firm. In 1706 the town had rioted furiously against the coming Union with England; by 1715 it was discovering what the Union was worth — legal access to the Atlantic colonies, and the beginnings of the tobacco trade that would make it rich. Set that beside the city’s granite Presbyterianism, and the Jacobite cause — a Catholic Stuart restored, the Revolution settlement undone — had nothing to offer Glasgow but ruin.
So when the Earl of Mar raised the standard of James ‘VIII’ in September 1715 and the Highlands came out, Glasgow armed. The burgh raised a volunteer regiment — some six hundred townsmen, equipped at the city’s own expense — fortified its approaches, and marched its men east to join the Duke of Argyll’s badly outnumbered government army holding the vital passage of Scotland at Stirling.
The campaign’s crisis came at Sheriffmuir, above Dunblane, on 13 November 1715: a strange, swirling battle in which each army’s right wing routed the other’s left, and both sides could claim the field. Strategically the claim was Argyll’s alone — Mar, with double the numbers, had failed to break through, and the rising bled away through the winter; the Pretender came, saw, and sailed back to France.
Glasgow’s war was mostly watchfulness — guards on the bridges, alarms about Highland raiders in the Lennox to the north-west, where Rob Roy MacGregor’s activities kept the militia’s nerves exercised — and the city came through untouched, its regiment home, its point made. Government took note of which Scottish burgh had turned out fastest for King George.
The ’Fifteen fixed the pattern that the ’Forty-Five would test again on a far grander scale: whatever romance the Stuart cause carried in the glens, in Glasgow it faced the least persuadable city in Britain — Whig by conviction, Presbyterian by inheritance, and getting steadily too rich under the existing management to want a revolution.