Francis Needham, 2nd Earl of Kilmorey

Francis Jack Needham, 2nd Earl of Kilmorey (12 December 1787 – 20 June 1880), known as Viscount Newry from 1822 to 1832, was an Anglo-Irish peer and Member of Parliament.

He was the son of General Francis Needham, 1st Earl of Kilmorey. He was elected to the House of Commons for Newry in 1819 (succeeding his father), a seat he held until 1826. In 1832 he succeeded his father in the earldom but as this was an Irish peerage it did not entitle him to a seat in the House of Lords. He served as High Sheriff of Down for 1828.

He married Jane Gun-Cuninghame in 1814.

Lord Kilmorey scandalised Victorian society by eloping with his ward, Priscilla Anne Hoste (26 June 1823 - 21 October 1854), when he was in his late fifties and she was 20. Priscilla Hoste was the daughter of Admiral Sir William Hoste and his wife Lady Harriet Walpole. Her father died when she was a small child and her mother allegedly was careless of her relations with Lord Kilmorey.

A year after their elopement, in July 1844, they had a child, Charles, who Lord Kilmorey acknowledged as his son and to whom he gave his surname. He set up his mistress in an adjoining house with an underground tunnel between the two.

Priscilla died of heart disease on 21 October 1854, and she was buried in a mausoleum which had been specially commissioned by Lord Kilmorey for them both, with the inscription "Priscilla, the beloved of Francis Jack, Earl of Kilmorey".

When Kilmorey himself died in June 1880, aged 92, he was buried beside her in the mausoleum underneath a bas-relief showing the dying Priscilla on a couch surrounded by her lover and ten-year-old son. The Kilmorey Mausoleum, in an ancient Egyptian design, is now a Grade II* listed monument. It cost £30,000 to build and was moved several times between Lord Kilmorey's homes. It is now located in Twickenham and maintained jointly by Richmond upon Thames Council and English Heritage.

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