Comment: This claim should have gone nowhere. Church marriage law presumes that a married couple will have intercourse unless proven otherwise. Then, the burden of proof was on Catherine, and the operative word is "proof". Catherine's unsupported word should not have sufficed, and at the time she made this claim, she was not a virgin. Thus, she had no support whatsoever for her claim. Church marriage law holds that dubious claims about the validity of the marriage are to be dismissed in favor of the validity.

However, her other point of attack depended on her nephew Charles -- King of Spain, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Naples -- to oppose the annulment. Charles disliked Henry both personally and politically, and was happy to help his aunt. 

More importantly, in 1527, Naples and the Papal States had a war, which the Pope lost. Pope Clement VII did not want a re-run of that war, so he stalled by taking Catherine's claim seriously. There were special commissions and so on to waste time.