Richard, 2^nd Earl of Mount Edgcumbe (1764 – 1839) was a politician and musicologist.

The son of George Edgcumbe, 1^st Earl of Mount Edgcumbe, and Emma, the daughter of the Archbishop of York, John Gilbert, Edgcumbe engaged in the Grand Tour and was painted in Florence (pictured).  

Edgcumbe was Member of Parliament for Fowey in 1786 – 1795, until elevated to the peerage on the death of his father when he also became Vice-Admiral of Cornwall, responsible for the defence of the coast in the event of a French invasion.

Elected a member of the Royal Society in 1808, he was also Lord Lieutenant of Cornwall from 1795 until his death.

A lover of opera, Edgcumbe compiled a list of all the operas he had attended between 1773 and 1823 and published it as ‘Musical Reminiscences of the Earl of Mount Edgcumbe’ and which has proven to be an important source of operatic history of that period.

In 1789, Edgcumbe married Lady Sophia Hobart, the youngest daughter of John Hobart, 2^nd  Earl of Buckinghamshire with whom he had five children.  Sophia, styled after marriage, as the Countess of Mount Edgcumbe died in 1806 and, unusually for those times, Edgcumbe did not remarry.