The Royal NS Volunteers never saw combat, but did play an important role in the defense of the colony of Nova Scotia, in the later years, of the American Revolution.

Legge, "an earnest but highly prejudiced and therefore much disliked man"[1] proposed to the Secretary of State on July 31, 1775 that he be permitted to raise a regiment of 1,000 men, to be recruited from the German, neutral and Irish settlers in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland.

Francis Legge received a dispatch from London dated October 16, 1775, authorizing him to raise the Loyal Regiment of Nova Scotia Volunteers as a fencible unit, for strictly local defense.

[2] The officers of the "Royal Nova Scotia Volunteers" were mostly lawyers and other men of the Halifax establishment and Francis Legge's political hangers-on, with little or no military experience, along with a number of subalterns brought in from the British Fleet.

[3] Recruiting for the Loyal Regiment of Nova Scotia Volunteers proved to be extremely difficult, owing to Francis Legge's unpopularity.

The next summer, forty men went back to colliery while twenty served as marines on the Royal Navy sloop HMS Gage.

A few months before disbandment, Brigadier-General Henry Edward Fox expressed: ... the great satisfaction he has received in seeing the two provincial battalions of Royal N.S.

Volunteers and the King's Orange Rangers, and highly approves of their discipline and military appearance, more particularly of the soldierlike manoeuvres and quick-step of the Royal N. Sco.