The British refused the last Peshwa's adopted son his father's pension, and after 1857 dug his treasure out of the wells at Bithur

Baji Rao II, the last Maratha peshwa, lost his kingdom to the British in the Third Maratha War and lived in exile at Bithur, near Kanpur, on a pension. In 1827 he adopted Nana Sahib. When Baji Rao died in 1852, Nana Sahib inherited the Bithur house but not the pension, which Britannica puts at £80,000 a year. Baji Rao had asked that it be continued. The governor-general, Lord Dalhousie, refused. Nana Sahib sent his agent Azimullah Khan to London to press the claim, and it failed. In June 1857 he joined the sepoys who rose at Kanpur, seized the treasury there and besieged the British garrison. A safe conduct he gave was broken on 27 June, and British women and children were killed at his palace. Rebels proclaimed him peshwa in July 1857. British forces under Havelock retook Kanpur and occupied Bithur. A dispatch from the Commander-in-Chief, printed in the Edinburgh Gazette in January 1858, reported that a brigade under Adrian Hope had swept away the Nana's property at Bithur and, "after very considerable exertion," recovered much treasure from the wells of his former palace. The work was not finished when the brigade had to leave. In 1859 Nana Sahib was driven into the Nepal hills. He was never found, and Britannica gives his death as about 1859, in Nepal, with question marks.