The tomb of Richard Rothe Fitz Edward, who died on the second of July 1637, was lifted a full metre from its original position in 1877, leaving its limestone predella, a stepped base platform, buried beneath the floor. Excavations carried out in 2015 uncovered that predella again, along with a stone burial vault beneath it containing coffin burials. The monument you see today is, spatially speaking, a Victorian adjustment of a seventeenth-century object.

The monument itself is the work of a craftsman named Patrick Kerin, whose name is carved in Latin on the right of the column pedestals: OPIFICE PATRICIO KERIN. It is built from fossiliferous limestone and rises across four distinct tiers. The lowest is a chest tomb with a plain front panel bearing the 1877 inscription recording how Lieutenant Colonel Lorenzo Rothe, last surviving son of the family, and Ann Salisbury White of Killaree in County Dublin, a granddaughter of George Rothe of County Kilkenny, raised and redecorated the monument. Above that sits a half-tester canopy, a projecting hood over the tomb that shelters the main inscription panel, which is flanked by Corinthian columns painted black with red and gold capitals. The Latin text, incised and gilded, describes Richard as a son of this city who discharged its offices and honours with notable probity, prudence, integrity and civility, and who, knowing he would return to the earth, arranged his own burial while still living. The third tier is an aedicule, a small architectural frame, whose Corinthian columns rise from pedestals ornamented with Tudor roses, and whose cartouche carries the heraldic arms of Rothe and Grace impaling those of Archer, with the motto SOLA SALVS SERVIRE DEO, meaning salvation lies in serving God alone. At the very top, the crown of the monument carries a finial painted black, bearing in white a memento mori, the familiar reminder of mortality rendered here as a skeleton holding a cross and an hourglass. The paint across the surfaces is almost certainly from the 1877 restoration rather than the original commission, though how much earlier decoration survives beneath is not clear.

The monument repays slow attention. The frieze of the second tier is painted with vines, flowers, and a geometric interlaced foliage pattern; grotesque masks sit at the base of the small finials flanking the aedicule columns; anthemion motifs, a classical palmette design, appear in white against green at the corners of the upper cartouche. The heraldic programme across the whole structure maps the Rothe family's network of alliances, with shields showing Rothe impaling Knaresborough, Archdeacon, Ormonde, Grace, and Archer appearing at different levels, each one a condensed record of marriage and connection among the Old English merchant families of early modern Kilkenny.