When I were a wee lad, the nuns taught me that Pope Clement VII refused to grant Henry VIII an annulment from Catherine of Aragon because Clement respected the sanctity of marriage. Imagine the shock when I found that the dear sisters had not told me the truth.
Henry VII arranged a political marriage between his eldest son, Arthur, and Catherine of Aragon. A couple of months after the wedding, Arthur died. The king wanted both to maintain the political alliance with Spain and to keep the dowry that Catherine brought (over a million in today's currency, which would have had to be repaid out of the Privy Purse). So he decide to marry his second son, Henry, to Catherine.
There was a problem: Under Church marriage law, one could not marry one's deceased spouse's sibling. However, this was just a "simple impediment", not a "dire impediment". A simple impediment can be gotten round with a dispensation, while a dire impediment cannot -- ie, marrying one's sister is a dire impediment, but marrying one's deceased spouse's brother is not.
So King Henry went to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Warham, to get a dispensation. Warham was then in a political fight with the King and refused to grant the dispensation; but Henry twisted his arm, and Warham gave in. Henry then applied to the Vatican for their approval -- Pope Julius II rubber stamped the dispensation and the fullness of time Henry and Catherine were married.
Twenty-some years later, it was obvious that Catherine, now in menopause, was not going to give Henry the son he so desperately craved. (If you want to know why Henry wanted a son, I can post on that. It wasn't just male chauvinism.) The incest that Henry was committing was preying on his mind -- that he had fallen in love with the young and beautiful Anne Boleyn was, of course, quite irrelevant.
Recall that Henry VII had twisted Archbishop Warham's arm to get the dispensation for his son's betrothal to Catherine. Another thing that Church marriage law says is that if any party to the marriage is acting under duress, the marriage is void. So Henry VIII requested an annulment on the grounds that the dispensation was improperly given. People such as Henry's sister Margaret had been given annulments on much slimmer grounds -- Margaret's annulment is an interesting story that I may post on.
However, Catherine did not want her marriage annulled. She claimed that she loved Henry; a dubious claim at best, since Henry did not treat her well. It is far more likely that Catherine did not want Mary to lose her place as Henry's only legitimate heir. After all, should Henry remarry and have a son, this son would take precedence over Mary as Henry's heir.
So, Catherine counter-attacked on two fronts: One based in Church marriage law, and the other purely political. In Church marriage law, in order for a marriage to be valid, two things must happen. The first is an exchange of vows before witnesses, and there was no question that this had happened when Catherine married Arthur. The second is that the marriage must be consummated. Catherine claimed that she and Arthur had never consummated their marriage. Thus, the dispensation was irrelevant, and her marriage to Henry was, in fact, her first marriage.
Now, this claim should have gone nowhere. Under Church marriage law, the burden of proof would have been on Catherine, and the operative word there is "proof". I'm sure that 16th century divorce lawyers and judges knew just as well as their 21st century counterparts do, that all parties in a divorce probably lie. Catherine's unsupported word should not have sufficed, and at the time she made this claim, she was not a virgo intacta. Thus, she had no support for her claim, let alone any proof.
Another thing that Church marriage law says is that dubious claims about the validity of the marriage are to be dismissed in favor of the marriage being valid.
However, her other point of attack was that she asked her nephew Charles to oppose the annulment. Charles disliked Henry both personally and politically -- Charles and Henry had entered an alliance against France which Henry broke at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and Charles felt that Henry had betrayed him. Charles held several titles: King of Spain, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Naples. In 1527, Naples and the Papal States had a war, which the Pope lost. Some of Charles' troops sacked Rome.
Pope Clement did not want a rerun of that war, so he took Catherine's claim of non-consummation seriously. There were Papal Delegates, special commissions of enquiry and so on. Basically, Clement was stalling.
Finally, Henry forced Clement's hand. He pushed through some laws in Parliament, one saying that marriage questions could be settled locally, another saying that all English clergy owed their first allegiance to the crown and a third saying that the Peter's Pence collection (an annual collection in each parish going directly to the Vatican) and the Annates (essentially a tax on Church properties that also went to the Vatican) should go to the Exchequer instead of to Rome. Clement was Not Amused, and decreed against Henry's annulment.
Thus, the actual reason for Clement's action was politics and money, not respect for marriage.
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