A rapacious and licentious soldiery.

Burke’s phrase compresses a political warning into a vivid moral indictment. “Rapacious” suggests predation—soldiers who plunder rather than protect—while “licentious” implies undisciplined, lawless conduct, especially where power meets civilian vulnerability. Taken together, the words evoke a military force unrestrained by law, custom, or civic accountability: an army that becomes a threat to the very society it is meant to defend. In Burke’s idiom, such a soldiery is a symptom of political breakdown, when institutions fail to channel force through legitimate authority and moral restraint. The phrase thus functions as a shorthand for the dangers of militarized power divorced from constitutional order.