Bradshaw threw in his lot with Charles Edward Stuart, when the prince and his Jacobite army invaded England. Bradshaw was one of the Jacobites assembled at Carlisle on 10 November 1745. He arrived back in Manchester on 29 November, where he went recruiting at the Bell Inn. He was a member of the Jacobite council of war, and received fellow Jacobites in his own house. Having accepted a captaincy in Colonel Francis Towneley's Manchester Regiment he marched to Derby, paying his men out of his own purse; he headed his company on horseback in the skirmish at Clifton Moor; he attended Charles Edward Stuart's levée on the retreat through Carlisle in December; and preferring to be in Lord Elcho's troop of horse when the Jacobite army was back in Scotland in the early weeks of 1746, he fought at the Battle of Falkirk Muir.