As the end-paper illustrations in the book show, the ruinous estate of Malplaquet has similarities with Stowe in Buckinghamshire, where White had taught at Stowe School during the 1930s, while the house is more like Blenheim Palace, the residence of the Dukes of Marlborough. The name is an allusion to Blenheim which depends upon knowing that the Battle of Blenheim was the first of the great Marlborough's major victories, while Malplaquet was his fourth and last. The titular Repose is a tiny forgotten island in the middle of an ornamental lake in the vast grounds of Malplaquet. A structure on it is occupied by descendants of the Lilliputians, brought to England two centuries earlier by a sea-captain, following their discovery by Lemuel Gulliver. The island provides the perfect setting for their timid and secretive civilisation, accessible only by boat and protected by a wall of brambles which is carefully cultivated by the island's occupants. Many of the monuments in the grounds of Malplaquet recall notable figures of the early 18th century; "Mistress Masham's Repose" itself commemorates Abigail Masham, a close confidante of Queen Anne. Although she has no other bearing on the story, she was a cousin of Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, thus providing another link between the fictional Palace of Malplaquet and the real Blenheim Palace. Blenheim and Stowe are in turn linked to each other, in that Richard Temple, 1st Viscount Cobham, who developed the house and gardens at Stowe in the early eighteenth century, was a notable soldier who had served under the Duke of Marlborough.