The inscription, carved in the florid Latin of the early seventeenth century, reads in translation: "Here lies Edmund, under the cold marble pure and undefiled, My whole world lies beneath where he sleepeth." The wordplay turns on the Latin "mundus", meaning both "world" and "clean" or "pure", a small verbal flourish tucked inside what is otherwise a formal dynastic memorial. The monument is also imperfect in a more straightforward way: the two heraldic shields set within the spandrels of the rounded arch, the decorative triangular spaces on either side of the arch's crown, were transposed in error, placing the husband's arms on the wrong side contrary to heraldic convention.

The woman responsible for the monument was Dame Ellen Geraldine, daughter of the Earl of Desmond and wife of Edmund Butler, Lord Baron of Dunboyne, who died on 17 March 1640. She commissioned the work not merely as a new monument but as a restoration of what the Latin inscription calls "this ancient monument of the most illustrious Barons of Dunboyne", suggesting the Butlers of Dunboyne already had a memorial presence here that she chose to renew and enlarge. Above the main inscription and its rounded arch sits a heraldic plaque, now with a broken pediment, displaying Edmund's quartered arms in considerable detail: the Dunboyne Butlers' chief indented with three golden escallop shells, covered cups, and the horizontal stripe associated with the Petyt arms. A lion and a horse support the shield, above which rises a tilting helm with mantling and a falcon emerging from a plume of ten ostrich feathers, all anchored by the Butler motto, TIMOR DOMINI FONS VITAE, "the fear of the Lord is the fountain of life". A near-identical set of arms appears elsewhere inside the abbey church, suggesting a deliberate programme of heraldic display by the same family or the same patron.