They were maladroit enough to attack him on his least vulnerable side, summoning him before the privy council to answer to a charge of receiving bribes in the administration of justice. How would you define maladroit?
The term proletariat is used in Marxist theory to name the social class that does not have ownership of the means of production and whose only means of subsistence is to sell their labor power for a wage or salary. Proletarians are wage-workers, while some refer to those who receive salaries as the salariat.
In Marxist theory, the workers are called the proletariat, from the old Roman word for the lower classes, but in Marxism, the proletariat are those people who have no productive assets except their own ability to work, their labor power, which they must sell for wages in order to live.