Pretty good start, Prince. The question is how Henry became those things -- innate traits or the result of a progressive unhinging of his emotional equilibrium?
To me there seem to be two distinct stages to Henry's life -- the period up through the first 15 or so years of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and then the rest of his life.
I believe there were two fundamental tenets in Henry's belief system and that he was ultimately cursed by the collision of those two tenets. The first was Catholicism. He truly believed in the dogma and ritual of the Church, being immensely proud of being granted the title of Defender of the Faith and taking the attendant duties seriously.
And he truly believed that England would descend back into dynastic civil war if he left her without an undisputed heir. To him, this meant a male born of an incontestable marriage.
We often forget how long Henry's relationship with Aragon was successful. He had known her for years while he was waiting to ascend the throne, and he surprised his court by the speed with which he chose to marry her upon his father's death, after years of Henry VII's shabby treatment had almost destroyed both her and Spain's expectation that the marriage would ever occur. During most of the years of their marriage, Henry treated Catherine with more respect than many queens then or since were accorded, including relying on her as a trusted counsellor and turning the reins of government over to her during foreign campaigns.
My guess is that, had the marriage produced a healthy male heir, Henry VIII would be far less the iconic figure he is today. But the marriage did not produce the desired heir, and that changed everything -- for Henry and for English history.
I think the need to escape the marriage to Aragon triggered a cascade of events that destroyed Henry's emotional equilibrium. He was forced to jettison a faith publicly that I think he nevertheless privately carried to his deathbed. This step began a process that had no easy stopping point, in part because any movement against the Church on the king's part imparted a surge of energy to the widespread anti-papism of the English population and the somewhat less widespread but nevertheless potent Reformation sympathies.
Henry's personality had traits that tended to run to extremes and, in a sense, I think he tried to exorcise his inner horror at the actions he was taking against the Church by becoming progressively more open to advice that ever more extreme measures were needed.
Many people find that, once they break a taboo the first time, all restraint collapses. And I think Henry's reign after the Great Matter is a playing out on a national stage of just that phenomenon. He had truly cared about Aragon for many years. But once he had been forced to employ psychologically brutal methods in setting aside a queen of high royal birth (grander, in fact, than his own), no subsequent setting aside of a queen would loom as large, even by more brutal means.
Once he had committed the horror of challenging the authority of a pope, he became obsessed with making sure no one would commit the same horror against him . . . hence the Oath of Loyalty and the Thomas More affair.
And, having destroyed the authority in his realm of the Catholic Church, how could that Church hold a significant portion of the realm's property? Hence the seizures of 1536-40.
I think Henry was an intelligent yet boorish man of massive energy and appetites who went through a catalytic psychological event that converted those appetites into monstrosities.
