The situation in Switzerland in 1530 had become one that called for great forbearance, restraint and statesmanship if the Confederation was to survive at all. The intensification of religious strife, the complex legal situation arising out of the St Gall differences, the exclusion of the Swiss evangelicals from the Schmalkaldic League and the inability to secure the integration of Constance, all put a special responsibility on Zurich. Powerful though Zwingli was there after his return from Marburg, he was far from being dictator or even prime minister. Many books have repeated the unguarded statement of Hans Salat, the ill-informed, prejudiced Catholic chronicler from Lucerne – ‘in Zurich Zwingli is mayor, council and gilds rolled into one’. Final authority remained, as it always had, with the great council, the Two Hundred, meeting weekly. Executive authority and church affairs were dealt with by the small council, both bodies having by 1529 become, in spite of some resistance by the ‘Constables’, exclusively evangelical. There was also a kind of standing advisory sub-committee, geheime Rat or heimlichen Sechs of leading citizens – a Bürgermeister, representatives of the chief gilds, and Zwingli – entrusted with external negotiations. Its terms of reference were never precisely defined, and the council need not, and often did not, follow its advice. For it Zwingli wrote numerous memoranda which have made his influence appear even greater than it was. His popularity in the pulpit, his numerous friends, vast industry, facility with pen and tongue, ensured attention, most obviously of all in matters of worship and of social conduct.