Entering the Foreign Office in 1858, Mitford was appointed Third Secretary of the British Embassy in St Petersburg. After service in the Diplomatic Corps in Shanghai, he went to Japan as second secretary to the British Legation at the time of the migration of the Japanese Seat of Power from Kyoto to Edo (modern-day Tokyo), known as the "Meiji Restoration". Mitford's memoirs recount the troubled time of the foreign settlements at Kobe over the fortnight following American Rear-Admiral Henry Bell's death, and the death of British consul Francis Gerard Mijburgh. Rededale served as secretary under Myburgh's replacement, John Frederik Lowder. There he met Ernest Satow and wrote "Tales of Old Japan" (1871), a book credited with making such Japanese Classics as "The Forty-seven Ronin" first known to a wide Western public. He resigned from the diplomatic service in 1873.