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.
Marx seems to think the proletariat is the ideal group to overthrow the bourgeoisie because it has no means of production or capital to safeguard. He also seems to take for granted that the proletarians would make good revolutionaries because a) they are massive in number (Working men of all countries, unite!), and c) they undergo shared suffering either in the workplace or during the revolutionary struggle.