“She felt trapped,” the late Princess of Wales’s former butler Paul Burrell said.

Princess Diana.Credit: Getty Images

Simply put? Princess Diana was not a fan of the royal family’s Christmas celebrations at Sandringham, with the late Princess of Wales’s former butler Paul Burrell saying that she preferred to celebrate the December 25 holiday in a way that was “very close-knit and very simple.”

Diana told her biographer Andrew Morton that Sandringham Christmases were “terrifying and so disappointing,” and Burrell told Marie Claire that she eventually decided would rather spend Christmas “by herself” than endure them anymore.

“She couldn’t stand the protocol,” Burrell told the outlet on behalf of Casino.org.

Princess Diana on Christmas Day 1993.Getty

Burrell worked with the Princess of Wales for the last decade of her life, and was still under her employ when she died in a Paris car crash on August 31, 1997. He said that Diana “tried her very best” to fit in at Sandringham, but that she found “the endless timetable” there to be “relentless.”

“You had to be downstairs for breakfast, in the dining room for lunch at 1 o’clock, in the drawing room for tea at 5, then changing again to go down for a drink before dinner at 8:15,” he added. “The day flew by, yet it was all so regimented, and you always had to be dressed appropriately.” Royal women were expected to change “three or four times” throughout each day, he continued.

Princess Diana meeting onlookers on Christmas Day at Sandringham in 1994.Getty Images

“She felt trapped,” Burrell said. “She would often say to me, ‘I’m climbing the walls at Sandringham because I don’t fit in. I don’t belong to that Victorian world. I want to be free of it.’”

Diana and her husband Prince Charles separated in 1992, and she spent her last Christmas at Sandringham in 1994, when she decided not to return after receiving an icy reception from the royal family. She spent her last two Christmases of her far-too-short life in 1995 and 1996 at her home at Kensington Palace, where her Christmas celebrations “were actually very simple and never elaborate at all,” Burrell said.

Princess Diana at Sandringham in 1993.

Getty

Before her sons Prince William and Prince Harry headed off to join the royal family in Norfolk, Diana would have “their own small Christmas at Kensington Palace,” including a lunch and presents. Burrell said he “hated leaving her” alone on Christmas Day, but that the princess insisted he go home and spend time with his family. On December 25, she would exercise and then “sit at her desk for most of the day, writing thank you letters for all the Christmas presents she had received, using her time productively with her correspondence.”

Princess Diana at a Christmas Day service on December 25, 1981.Getty Images

It was “isolated,” Burrell said, but added “that was the way she liked it.” Diana’s former hairdresser Richard Dalton previously told Kitty Kelley for her book The Royals that Diana “just hated going to Sandringham for Christmas,” and royal biographer Ingrid Seward said that Diana always used to leave the royal retreat as soon as possible. “When things were really not going at all well, she was to dread these royal family Christmases,” Seward told The Sun’s “Royal Exclusive” show.

Diana’s former bodyguard Ken Wharfe told People that Sandringham “was purgatory for her,” adding that she “confined herself to spending time in the kitchen with the chef or with people like me in the hope that time would while away and she could get back to London.”