Mary Crowninshield Endicott Chamberlain Carnegie was born on March 15, 1864 in Salem, Massachussets, United States; the daughter of William Crowninshield Endicott, a lawyer, and Ellen Peabody. She was a descendant of John Endecott, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Mary's education, in a private school, was sketchy.
In the spring of 1882 Mary accompanied her parents to Europe. In England they greatly enjoyed the social life of London. In September 1883 they returned to the United States, and in February 1885 her father became secretary of war in Grover Cleveland's cabinet.
After her marriage on February 11, 1888 to Joseph Chamberlain, an Englishman, Carnegie spent the next sixty-nine years in England, but she never lost touch with Massachusetts, for the Endicotts and Chamberlains visited each other frequently. For the next eighteen years, Mrs. Chamberlain was absorbed in her husband's political career in the House of Commons and as colonial secretary. She accompanied him everywhere, listening rather than talking. Queen Victoria liked her. It was in no small part due to her that her husband progressed in the queen's view from "that dangerous radical" to her "favorite minister. "
After her first husband's death, Mary Chamberlain settled in London.
After her second marriage to the Reverend William Hartley Carnegie, she spent the next two decades in the higher circles of the Church of England. She made the canon's house in Westminster a hospitable center of Anglo-American relations. The brocade curtains that her grandfather had bought in Paris in 1844 for his Salem drawing room fitted the windows in Dean's Yard without alteration. When William died, his widow bought a house at 41 Lennox Gardens and entered the third stage of her London life. Her stepson, Neville Chamberlain, became prime minister in 1937. The war that he had been unable to avert brought less change to Mary Carnegie's way of life than to most others. She had not the slightest intention of seeking refuge in the country or of returning to America: in London she had lived for fifty years, and in London she would stay. With food and servants in short supply, she kept a remarkable approximation of the style that she had created as a bride. Even during the blitz, she entertained and encouraged by welcoming at her table the numerous American and British relatives whose military and naval duties had brought them to London. Beginning in 1947, Mrs. Carnegie returned to Boston each summer to visit her sister-in-law. Although her eyesight began to fail, her spirits never did. On her ninety-third birthday she went to the theater in London. When it was suggested that she might like to go home at the end of the play, she replied, "I should hate that! I want to be taken to a large, loud, gay restaurant for supper!" Until a fortnight before her death in London she gave dinner parties as usual.
In November 1887, while living in Washington, Mary met at the British legation Joseph Chamberlain, who had come to attend a fisheries conference. Chamberlain was fifty-one and a widower for thirteen years, having lost two wives in childbirth. On February 11, 1888, he proposed marriage and was accepted. The Endicotts were not enchanted but accepted the engagement on condition that it be kept secret until after the presidential election, lest the Irish vote against Cleveland for tolerating a cabinet member whose daughter would marry an Englishman. The wedding took place in Washington on November 15, 1888. In most Anglo-American marriages of the period, the man had the position and the wife the money; with the Chamberlains the roles were reversed. After a honeymoon in France and Italy, the Chamberlains lived in Birmingham and in London. Mary Chamberlain, who never had a child of her own, thus acquired two stepchildren: including twenty-five-year-old Austen, a future foreign secretary, and nineteen-year-old Neville, who would become prime minister. In July 1906 Joseph Chamberlain had a paralytic stroke that effectively ended his political career. He died eight years later. On August 3, 1916, she married the Reverend William Hartley Carnegie, a widower with five daughters, who was rector of St. Margaret's Westminster, a canon of the abbey, and chaplain to the speaker of the House of Commons. Canon Carnegie died in 1936 and was buried in the nave of Westminster Abbey.
