In 1740 the Whig scholar Francis Peck announced that Tyrannicall- Government Anatomized, published (according to its title page) on 30 January 1642 by order of a committee of the House of Commons, was in fact the work of John Milton. Peck argued, plausibly enough, that the publication of this work (which he identified as a translation of Baptistes (The Baptist), a Latin tragedy by the sixteenth-century humanist George Buchanan) was a riposte to Charles I's notorious attempt to arrest five members of the Commons in January 1642. For the leading figures in Buchanan's dramatization of the conspiracy against John the Baptist 'might be understood to answer to the characters of divers great persons then living'. The seventeenth-century counterparts of King Herod, his wife Herodias, and the High Priest Malchus, were King Charles I, Queen Henrietta Maria, and Archbishop Laud; and the play thus formed a stinging commentary on the 'league between LAUD & HENRIETTA MARIA, to extirpate the protestant religion in the three nations'. Peck's case for declaring Milton the translator rested on Milton's 'utter aversion for the clergy of every sort', on the fact that 'LIBERTY was MILTON'S darling subject', and on 'the republican turn of his principles' (Peck, 271, 274, 276, 279).