Lent his life the dignity of woe. While at Denbigh, whither he had sought refuge on the discomfiture of his troops before Chester, he received the mortifying intelligence that Montrose had been surprised near Berwick by Lesley's steel-clad troopers, and that his men, after a brief but gallant resistance, had laid down their arms on the promise of quarter. All hope from that direction was now at an end, and the idea of moving northwards was abandoned. Turning his steps southwards, the fallen monarch, accompanied by a few broken squadrons, retreated by way of Chirk, Bridgenorth, and Lichfield to Newark: whence the march was continued until the evening of the 5th of November, when the tired fugitives entered the city of Oxford, Charles having, as his affectionate historian writes, "finished the most tedious and grievous march that ever King was exercised in." On the 16th of November, three weeks after the defeat of the Royalist army on Rowton Heath, the garrison of Beeston, after bravely holding out for well-nigh twelve months, and undergoing the severest privations, surrendered to Sir William Brereton. The loss of the great Cheshire stronghold was a severe blow, but the hopes of Charles had not entirely vanished. Chester still held out, and through the long months of that dreary winter its gallant defenders persistently refused to yield. On the 10th of December Brereton's army was reinforced, in accordance with an order of the Parliament, by the Lancashire forces commanded by Colonel Booth, who were then flushed with their recent successes at Lathom House; but rather than surrender the loyal citizens elected to keep a "Lenten Christmas," and, as the old chronicler has it, "to feed on horses, dogs, and cats." On the 1st of January, 1645-6, Brereton sent a preliminary summons to the governor, Lord Byron,[41] demanding that the city should be immediately given up; but the summons was disregarded; and subsequent demands were treated with the same contumely, until at last, on the 3rd of February, when the brave defenders had become reduced to the last extremity by famine, the city and castle were given up to Brereton, after having withstood a close siege for fully twenty weeks. The following extract from a letter preserved among the MS. collection of Walker, the historian, of "The Sufferings of the Clergy," in the Bodleian Library, in which the writer, Mr. Edward Seddon, a native of Chester, describing the sufferings his father had to endure during and after the siege, gives a vivid picture of the hardships our forefathers had to face in that great struggle:--