A few months later West wrote to Trumbull that all England was so engaged in fighting and money-making that no one cared for the fine arts but the King. "His Majesty has by a single act placed under my feet all those vipers who have been endeavouring for some years past to sting and drive me out of the chair of the Royal Academy." He described how on his return from Windsor he had called a meeting and given a short account of George's gracious reception of him "both as president and Mr. West. ... I must say I never saw an opposition so crushed."  However, West would not let his adherents pass a motion of censure against his foes.

But the King, whose mind was whirling ever more rapidly now, soon returned to his suspicion of the American "democrat." Again the harsh words he spoke behind West's back encouraged the op­position in the Academy, and West, refusing to be daunted by a mere worldly monarch, became even louder in his praises of the French revolution. The English court, deep in war, trembling at the spectre of an invasion from across the Channel, could not.stand such heresy; the connoisseurs turned on their former darling. A bishop exclaimed at Windsor: "Oh, do look at those wretched things by West!" while Queen Charlotte-paled at the mere mention of West's name, and the princesses spoke of him with disgust.

On November 29, 1805, West told Farington he was sick of the whole intrigue; he would resign as president. On December 1 he added that he would not continue in the presidency for a thou­sand pounds a year. He did not trouble to tell the King personally of his decision; he sent a letter. Although he probably could have been re-elected, he continued to refuse to run, and on December 10 watched Wyatt's election to succeed him. Farington commented that West's appearance had changed very much in a year; he had become very thin and bony.

West set to work grimly to show the Academy what it had lost by repudiating a great painter and electing an architect; he painted The Death of Nelson. A year or so before, according to a story, he told George Ticknor, West had sat beside the admiral at-a public dinner. After regretting that in his youth he had never imbibed a taste for art, Nelson said: "But there is one picture whose power I do feel. I never pass a paint shop where your Death of Wolfe is in the window without being stopped by it." He asked West why he had not painted other similar subjects.

"Because, my lord, there are no more subjects."

"Damn it!" cried Nelson. "I didn't think of that."

"But, my lord, I fear that your intrepidity may yet furnish me such another scene, and if it should I shall certainly avail myself of it."

"Will you?" cried Nelson, pouring out champagne and clinking his glass violently against West's. "Will you, Mr. West? Then I hope I shall die in the next battle." The next battle was Trafalgar.

West did not send his Death of Nelson to the Academy exhibi­tion, but showed it as a rival attraction in his own studio; the sub­ject was so popular and the artist's reputation still so great with the masses, who did not know of his political heresy, that thirty thou­sand people came to see the painting.

Although West pretended that "what he had experienced in the Academy, and the abhorrence in which he held many members of it, rendered it hateful to him," he was delighted to see Wyatt's administration lead to nothing but intrigue and dissatisfaction. The architect did not have the calm, dispassionate temper of the American-born painter; instead of smoothing over disagreements between members, he aggravated them, and soon the Academy meetings degenerated into acrimonious battles that made even West's former opponents miss the more quiet years of his presi­dency.