In February, 1849, the Queen opened Parliament in person. Perhaps the greatest source of anxiety was now the Sikh War, in which the warlike tribes were gaining advantages over the English troops, though Mooltan had been reduced the previous month. A drawn battle was fought between Lord Gough's force and that of Chuttar Singh at Chillianwallah. While the English were not defeated, their losses in men, guns and standards were sore and humiliating to the national pride. Sir Charles Napier was ordered out, and, in spite of bad health, obeyed the order. But in the meantime Lord Gough had retrieved his losses by winning at Goojerat a great victory over the Sikhs and Afghans, which in the end compelled the surrender of the enemy, with the restoration of the captured guns and standards. On the 29th of March the kingdom of the Punjaub was proclaimed as existing no longer, and the State was annexed to British India; while the beneficial influence of Edwardes and the Lawrences rendered the wild Sikhs more loyal subjects, in a future time of need, than the trained and petted Sepoy mercenaries proved themselves. On the afternoon of the 19th of May, after the Queen had held one of her most splendid Drawing-rooms, when she was driving in a carriage with three of her children up Constitution Hill, she was again fired at by a man standing within the railings of the Green Park. Prince Albert was on horseback, so far in advance that he did not know what had occurred, till told of it by the Queen when he assisted her to alight. But her Majesty did not lose her perfect self-possession. She stood up, motioned to the coachman, who had stopped the carriage for an instant, to go on, and then diverted the children's attention by talking to them. The man who had fired was immediately arrested. Indeed, he would have been violently assaulted by the mob, had he not been protected by the police. He proved to be an Irishman, named Hamilton, from Limerick, who had come over from Ireland five years before, and worked as a bricklayer's labourer and a navvy both in England and France. Latterly he had been earning a scanty livelihood by doing chance jobs. There was this to distinguish him from the other dastardly assailants of the Queen: he was not a half-crazed, morbidly conceited boy, though he also had no conceivable motive for what he did. He appears to have taken his measures, in providing himself with pistol and powder, from a mere impulse of stolid brutality. His pistol contained no ball, so that he was tried under the Felon's Act, which had been provided for such offences, and sentenced to seven years' transportation.