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Richard Bickerton Pemell Lyons, 1st Earl Lyons (26 April 1817 – 5 December 1887) was a British diplomat, who was the favourite diplomat of Queen Victoria, during the four great crises of the second half of the 19th century: Italian unification, the American Civil War, the Eastern Question, and the replacement of France by Germany as the dominant Continental power following the 1870 Franco Prussian War. Lyons resolved the Trent Affair during the American Civil War; and contributed to the Special Relationship and to the Entente Cordiale; and for predicting, 32 years before World War I, the occurrence of an imperial war between France and Germany that was to destroy Britain's international dominance. Lyons served as British Ambassador to the United States from 1858 to 1865, during the American Civil War; and as British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1865 to 1867; and as British Ambassador to France from 1867 to 1887, which was then the most prestigious office in the British Service. Lyons was offered the office of British Foreign Secretary on three separate occasions, by three separate Prime Ministers (Gladstone, Disraeli, and Salisbury), and was encouraged to accept that office by Queen Victoria, but he declined the offer on all three occasions. Lyons endorsed the British Conservative Party faction of the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, and was distrusted by Gladstonian Liberals as a 'Tory leaning diplomat'. Lyons's most recent biographer Jenkins (2014) considers Lyons to be the exemplar of the ‘Foreign Office mind’ who created a canon of practical norms of diplomacy, including the necessity for nominal neutrality in domestic party politics and for private correspondence with Cabinet ministers. Lyons founded the 'Lyons School' of British diplomacy: which consisted of Sir Edwin Egerton; Sir Maurice de Bunsen; Sir Michael Herbert; Sir Edward Baldwin Malet; Sir Frank Lascelles; Sir Gerard Lowther; Sir Edmund Monson, 1st Baronet; and Sir Nicholas O'Conor.

Richard Bickerton Pemell was born in Boldre, Lymington, Hampshire, on 26 April 1817. His father was the diplomat and admiral Edmund Lyons, 1st Baron Lyons and his mother was Augusta Louisa Rogers. His siblings were: Anne Theresa Bickerton Lyons (1815 – 1894), who became Baroness von Würtzburg; and Captain Edmund Moubray Lyons (1819 – 1855); and Augusta Mary Minna Catherine Lyons (1821 – 1886), who became Duchess of Norfolk and the grandmother of Philip Kerr, 11th Marquess of Lothian. Lyons's cousins included Sir Algernon Lyons, Admiral of the Fleet and Aide de Camp to Queen Victoria and Richard Lyons Pearson, Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. who throughout his career 'desired Anglo French cooperation', and had 'a perceptive assessment of the French collective psyche', and was 'ever ready to exculpate French behaviour'.

Richard Bickerton Lyons was tutored at Elizabeth College, Guernsey, by Sir John Colborne, in Classics, English, French, arithmetic, and theology, where he received a Latin Prize in 1828. He and all of his siblings accompanied their father and their mother to Valletta, Malta, in 1828, where they were homeschooled in the works of Enlightenment philosophy, including those of William Robertson, and in history and in classical civilisation, and in French and in Modern Greek. Richard Bickerton returned to England to attend Winchester College, and subsequently Christ Church, Oxford, from which he graduated BA (in 1838) and MA (in 1843). received an honorary DCL from Oxford University.

Lord Lyons in December 1864 left Washington as a consequence of insufficient health, after his final meetings with Abraham Lincoln and with Seward, both of whom wished for his return to the position of British Ambassador at Washington. However, Lyons's health subsequently deteriorated further and, in the spring of 1865, compelled Lyons to resign his Ambassadorship to the United States. Lyons refused the preference of Queen Victoria and of the British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston that he return to the Ambassadorship to the USA, and he nominated Sir Frederick Bruce to be his successor: which the Queen and the Prime Minister accepted. and died on 5 December at Norfolk House, which was the residence of his nephew Duke of Norfolk.

Lord Lyons's 1887 obituary in The Morning Post describes him as ‘the idea of a pattern and ideal diplomatist’ who ‘knew the contents of every modern dispatch’ ‘by heart’. Lyons's most recent biographer Jenkins (2014) considers Lyons to be the exemplar of the ‘Foreign Office mind’ who created a canon of practical norms of diplomacy, including the necessity for nominal neutrality in domestic party politics and for private correspondence with Cabinet ministers. Lyons attained the height of his influence during the premierships of his political ally the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, who offered him the position of Foreign Secretary in 1886. In the 21st century, including by his biographer Brian Jenkins (2014), and by T. G. Otte (2011), and by Scott T. Cairns (2004), Lyons has been identified as a founder of a 'Lyons School' of British diplomacy that consisted of Sir Edwin Egerton; Sir Maurice de Bunsen; Sir Michael Herbert; Sir Edward Baldwin Malet; Sir Frank Lascelles; Sir Gerard Lowther; Sir Edmund Monson, 1st Baronet; and Sir Nicholas O'Conor.

Lyons was the great granduncle of the writer Maisie Ward, and the great great granduncle of the translator Rosemary Sheed and of the writer Wilfred Sheed. Lyons is a minor character in the alternate history novel Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove, and in the Southern Victory Series novel The Great War: American Front by Turtledove, in which he is sent to Washington, D. C., after the Battle of Camp Hill, to advise Abraham Lincoln that the United Kingdom and the Second French Empire were to recognise and defend the Confederate States of America, after the Union was decisively defeated in battle. Lyons is also a minor character in the historical novel Freedom by William Safire.