As an East India Company rescue force from Allahabad approached Cawnpore, 120 British women and children captured by the rebels were butchered in what came to be known as the Bibi Ghar massacre, their remains then thrown down a nearby well.

[1] Following the recapture of Cawnpore and the discovery of the massacre, the angry Company forces engaged in widespread retaliation against captured rebel soldiers and local civilians.

He also assumed that, in event of a rebellion, the Indian troops would probably collect their arms, ammunition and money and head to Delhi and therefore he did not expect a long siege.

Elderly Risaldar-Major Bhowani Singh, who chose not to hand over the regimental colours and join the rebel sepoys, was subsequently cut down by his subordinates.

[2] After obtaining arms, ammunition and money, the rebel troops started marching towards Delhi to seek further orders from Bahadur Shah II, who had been proclaimed the Badshah-e-Hind ("Emperor of India").

Nana Sahib had sent his envoy Dewan Azimullah Khan to London, to petition the Queen against the company's decision, but failed to evoke a favourable response.

In May 1857, Nana Sahib arrived in Cawnpore with 300 soldiers, stating that he intended to support the British: Wheeler asked him to take charge of the government treasury in the Nawabganj area.

Nana Sahib initially decided to march to Delhi and fight the British as a Mughal subordinate, but Azimullah Khan advised him that leading the rebels in Kanpur would increase his prestige more than serving a weak Muslim king.

The rebels were reluctant at first, but decided to join Nana Sahib, when he promised to double their pay and reward them with gold, if they were to destroy the British entrenchment.

As the ground was too hard to dig graves, the British would pile the dead bodies outside the buildings, and drag and dump them inside a dried well during the night.

During the first week of the siege, Nana Sahib's forces encircled the entrenchment, created loopholes and established firing positions in the surrounding buildings.

In response to Moore's sorties, Nana Sahib decided to attempt a direct assault on the British entrenchment, but the rebel soldiers displayed a lack of enthusiasm.

On 13 June, the British lost their hospital building to a fire, which destroyed most of their medical supplies and caused the deaths of a number of wounded and sick artillerymen who burned alive in the inferno.

[4] With approval of General Wheeler, a Eurasian civil servant called Jonah Shepherd slipped out of the entrenchment in disguise to ascertain the condition of Nana Sahib's forces.

In return for surrender, Nana Sahib promised the safe passage of the British to the Satichaura Ghat, a landing on the Ganges from which they could depart for Allahabad.

Though controversy surrounds what exactly happened next at the Satichaura Ghat[5] and who fired the first shot,[9] soon afterwards the departing British were attacked by the rebel sepoys and either killed or captured.

After swimming downstream for a few hours they reached shore, where they were discovered by some Rajput matchlockmen who worked for Raja Dirigibijah Singh, a British loyalist.

[4] The Company forces, consisting of around 1,000 British, 150 Sikh soldiers, and 30 irregular cavalry, had set out from Allahabad under the command of General Henry Havelock to retake Cawnpore and Lucknow.

An angry Begum Hussaini Khanum denounced the sepoys' act as cowardice and asked her aide to finish the job of killing the captives.

[4][22] Brigadier General Neill, who took the command at Cawnpore, immediately began a programme of swift and vicious drumhead military justice (culminating in summary execution) for any sepoy rebel captured from the city who was unable to prove he was not involved in the massacre.

Rebels confessing to or believed to be involved in the massacre were forced to lick the floor of the Bibighar compound, after it had been wetted with water by low-caste people, while being whipped.

The Muslim sepoys were sewn into pig skins before being hanged and low-caste street sweepers were employed to execute the high-caste Brahmin rebels to add additional religious disgrace to their punishment.

Others were shot or bayonetted, whilst some were also tied across cannons that were then fired, an execution method initially used by the rebels and the earlier Indian powers, such as the Marathas and the Mughals.

Major Stevenson led a group of Madras Fusiliers and Sikh soldiers to Bithoor and occupied Nana Sahib's palace without any resistance.

British civil servant Jonah Shepherd, who had been rescued by Havelock's army, spent the next few years after the rebellion attempting to put together a list of those killed in the entrenchment.

Meanwhile, the British conducted a retaliatory action under the command of Sir James Outram, 1st Baronet by demolishing Nana Sahib's palace in Bithoor with cannon-fire.

An enclosed pavement outside the church marks the graves of over 70 British men captured and executed on 1 July 1857, four days after the Satichaura Ghat massacre.

[35] An additional memorial detailing the losses suffered by the 32nd Cornwall Regiment Light Infantry is located inside the west entrance to Exeter Cathedral.

[38] The contemporary Indian report by Kalpi devi in the local journal Hindupanch covered the incident of the punitive action by the British and burning down of Nana Sahib's palace along with his young daughter, Mainavati.

In 1876, the editor of the Animal World drew Dr. Philip Sclater's attention to this and the press charged the Zoological Society of London with encouraging cruelty, "pandering to public brutality", while one writer in the Whitehall Review (27 April 1878) protested against "the Cawnpore Massacre enacted diurnally" and headed his article "Sepoyism at the Zoo.