In Charles the Second's time, the representative of this ancient
family was Sir Geoffrey Peveril, a man who had many of the ordinary
attributes of an old-fashioned country gentleman, and very few
individual traits to distinguish him from the general portrait of that
worthy class of mankind. He was proud of small advantages, angry at
small disappointments, incapable of forming any resolution or opinion
abstracted from his own prejudices--he was proud of his birth, lavish
in his housekeeping, convivial with those kindred and acquaintances,
who would allow his superiority in rank--contentious and quarrelsome
with all that crossed his pretensions--kind to the poor, except when
they plundered his game--a Royalist in his political opinions, and one
who detested alike a Roundhead, a poacher, and a Presbyterian. In
religion Sir Geoffrey was a high-churchman, of so exalted a strain
that many thought he still nourished in private the Roman Catholic
tenets, which his family had only renounced in his father's time, and
that he had a dispensation for conforming in outward observances to
the Protestant faith. There was at least such a scandal amongst the
Puritans, and the influence which Sir Geoffrey Peveril certainly
appeared to possess amongst the Catholic gentlemen of Derbyshire and
Cheshire, seemed to give countenance to the rumour.

Such was Sir Geoffrey, who might have passed to his grave without
further distinction than a brass-plate in the chancel, had he not
lived in times which forced the most inactive spirits into exertion,
as a tempest influences the sluggish waters of the deadest mere. When
the Civil Wars broke out, Peveril of the Peak, proud from pedigree,
and brave by constitution, raised a regiment for the King, and showed
upon several occasions more capacity for command than men had
heretofore given him credit for.