[1] He was a banker, an owner of coal and ironstone mines in Durham and Yorkshire, and a director of numerous companies, including the family's original woollen mill business Henry Pease & Co., the family bank J & JW Pease, The Owners of the Middlesbrough Estate, the locomotive manufacturers Robert Stephenson and Company, and the North Eastern Railway of which he became chairman.

[2] He was a J.P. for Durham and a Deputy Lieutenant, J.P. for the North Riding of Yorkshire,[3] President of the Peace Society, President of the Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade, and a campaigner against capital punishment.

He was created a baronet of Hutton Lowcross and Pinchinthorpe in 1882, the first Quaker to accept an honour from the state, and in 1894 was offered a peerage by Gladstone, but expressing his indifference left the decision to his eldest son Alfred, who let the matter lapse.

[5] In his capacity as President of the Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade, Pease attempted to pass a motion in the House of Commons in 1891 to declare the opium trade "morally indefensible" and remove Government support for it.

The motion failed to pass (despite majority support in the House) due to an amendment calling for compensation to India, but it brought the anti-opium campaign into the public eye and increased opposition to the trade.