Sir Francis James Newton KCMG CVO (1857 – 8 May 1948) was a senior colonial administrator in different parts of the British Empire, principally in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

He was the son of Francis Rodes Newton (1827–1886), an English planter from Elveden Hall in Suffolk, and his Danish wife Anna Louisa (1833–1862), daughter of Major Jacob Heitmann Gyllich, Knight of the Dannebrog, and his wife Adriana Louise von Meley, daughter of Frederik Christian von Meley.

In 1923 he was appointed Colonial Secretary of Southern Rhodesia and in the 1924 election to the Assembly came top of the poll for the constituency of Mazoe (as it was then spelled).

However he resigned on 26 August 1924 on appointment as High Commissioner of Southern Rhodesia to the United Kingdom, a post he held until he was succeeded by John Wallace Downie in 1930.

[10] Their only child to reach adulthood, Charles Hercules Francis Augustus Newton, an officer in the King's Royal Rifle Corps, was killed in action in Belgium in 1916.