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.
And it would probably use the terms in the same way. In Marxism, the proletariat is the working class, including farmers and low-skilled factory workers. They do not own any means of production. The bourgeoisie are the capitalist class, the wealthy, who own most of the means of production. Means of production include factories and businesses.