Blunt was born on 24 September 1879 in Saint-Malo, Ille-et-Vilaine, France, where he was brought up before his mother returned the family to England in 1887.

[1] He was younger son in second marriage of Captain Francis Theophilus Blunt (1837–1881)[2] of the British Colonial Service, ultimately Chief Civil Commissioner for the Seychelles.

[2] He was privately educated by his widowed mother, and attended Church Hill preparatory school at Crondall near Farnham, Hampshire, before entering Marlborough College in 1893.

[3] He was ordained deacon in 1904 and priest in 1905 by Francis Paget, Bishop of Oxford, in whose diocese he served as a licensed preacher until 1907, when he became curate at Carrington, Nottingham, an industrial parish.

[3] Politically, he drifted leftward and during the Second World War advocated communism (although he criticised the way it was practiced in Soviet Russia) and supported the Beveridge Report in 1943.

The speech was mundane until Blunt talked about the coronation service: On this occasion the King holds an avowedly representative position.

[12] He took his notes back to the office and, on conferring with his colleague Charles Leach, agreed that the national media might be interested and sent the story over the wire to the Press Association.

When asked about it later, Blunt revealed that the comments he made had been intended to be a lament of the King's indifference to churchgoing.

[13] The Bishop's doubts about Edward VIII's piety stood in marked contrast with the views of some other clergy such as the Rev Robert Anderson Jardine, of Darlington, who several months later conducted the wedding ceremony of the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Warfield, as she was again known.