When Charles Edward Stuart raised his father’s standard at Glenfinnan in August 1745, Glasgow’s position was exactly what it had been in 1715, only richer: the tobacco city had everything staked on the Hanoverian settlement and nothing to hope for from the Stuarts. The rising’s first touch proved the point — it came as a demand for money. In late September, with the Jacobite army victorious at Prestonpans and mastering Scotland, the Prince’s agent John Hay arrived to assess the notoriously Whiggish town, and Glasgow bought him off with £5,500 in cash and £500 in goods against an initial demand of £15,000 — extortion, as Provost Andrew Cochrane’s vivid letters called it, paid with clenched teeth.
The city’s answer was to arm for the government: two battalions of militia raised at the burgh’s expense — around twelve hundred men — while the magistrates corresponded busily with the Hanoverian command. Glasgow’s regiment garrisoned, guarded and, in January 1746, stood in the government line at the Battle of Falkirk, where in sleet and gathering dark the army was beaten and the Glasgow men took casualties and capture in the rout — the city’s bloodiest single contribution to the war.
By then Glasgow had endured the rising at first hand: the Jacobite army, retreating from Derby, occupied the city over Christmas and New Year 1745–46 — ten days told fully on the next page — and requisitioned the clothing of an entire army from its merchants and weavers.
Culloden in April 1746 ended it, and Glasgow’s ledger was presented in due course: Parliament, acknowledging the burgh’s losses and its conspicuous loyalty, voted the city £10,000 in compensation in 1749 — a rare distinction, and one Glasgow’s magistrates made sure was remembered. The money helped; the vindication was the point.
The ’Forty-Five was the last war fought on Scottish soil, and Glasgow’s part in it is easily summarised: the most implacably anti-Jacobite city in the kingdom, it paid, armed, bled a little and profited afterwards — while acquiring, in ten awkward days that winter, its one great romantic anecdote, which follows.