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.
This is the name for the working classes, and in every society, proletariat are always in an overwhelming majority. The modern society has born out of the old feudal system where the landlords were Bourgeois while the slaves and vassals were there to serve them.