Marcelino Ponce de Leon had received what was in those days considered a very superior education, had spent three years at the University of Cordova, was well read in the Latin classics, could speak French fluently, and had some knowledge of English. He had returned from Cordova without taking a degree, when his father had wished him to visit Europe, but Marcelino listened to the earnest entreaties of his mother and remained at home, safe, as she thought, from the contagion of those new ideas which she had been taught to look upon with dread.
Mother and son sat far into the night talking earnestly together, the mother daring not to leave him lest he should go she knew not whither, and finding her influence totally unavailing to turn him from what she considered his mad purpose. So they sat on a cold June night in an uncarpeted, fireless room, in which the darkness was made visible by the dull flame of a shaded lamp; so they sat, wrestling together for the mastery; love and tenderness on the one side, love and reverence on the other, equally fearful of giving pain, equally determined not to yield. As the clock in a distant chamber chimed the midnight hour, the husband and the father stood before them. A well-built man of medium stature, with dark-brown hair and eyes, and with a clear, almost ruddy complexion. His son, as he stood up on his entrance, seemed taller by the head, but was more slimly built.
"Marcelino is going," said Doña Constancia; "he will not submit to these English."
"He may stay and yet not submit," answered Don Roderigo. "Sobremonte has fled; they cannot occupy the whole city, and cannot know who are in it, save those who present themselves. I have orders to present myself and shall do so," he said somewhat bitterly, "but there is no reason why you should do so too, unless you wish it."
Marcelino Ponce de Leon remained that night in his father's house, and the next day he heard the sound of the English trumpets and drums from afar off, but he saw them not.
The next day, the 27th June 1806, 1500 British troops under the command of General Beresford marched into the city, a city of 70,000 inhabitants, with their drums beating and their colours flying, and took peaceable possession thereof; General Beresford establishing his headquarters at the fort and hoisting the English flag upon the flag-staff. Most of the local authorities hastened to give in their submission, and Buenos Aires became an English city.
"And from the windows, o'er the walls,
The sable web of mourning falls,
The King weeps as a woman o'er
His loss, for it is much and sore.
Woe is me! Alhama!"
Byron's translation—last verse.