In the morning, King James I of England learned that the plot to blow up the Parliament building had been foiled.
Around midnight on 4-5 November, Magistrate Sir Thomas Knivett spotted Guy Fox lurking in the tunnels beneath the Parliament building and ordered a search of the site.
About 20 barrels of gunpowder were found and Fox was detained. After being tortured on a shelf, Fox confessed that he was a participant in an English Catholic conspiracy to eliminate the Protestant government in England and replace it with Catholic leadership.
The well-known gunpowder conspiracy was organized by Robert Catesby, an English Catholic whose father was persecuted by Queen Elizabeth I for refusing to obey the Church of England.
Guy Fox had converted to Catholicism, and his religious zeal prompted him to fight in the Spanish army in the Netherlands. Catesby and several other conspirators rented a basement that extended under parliament, where Fox planted gunpowder and hid barrels under coal and wood.
As the 5 November parliament session approached, Katez recruited more English Catholics to participate in the conspiracy than did, one of which, Francis Tresham, warned his Catholic brother-in-law, Lord Montag, not to attend Parliament that day. Monteagle alerted the government that, hours before the attack, Guy Fox was found with explosives.
By torturing Fox, King James learns the identity of his accomplice. In the weeks that followed, British authorities killed or arrested all the plotters and brought survivors to trial, as well as some innocent British Catholics.
Guy Fox himself, along with other surviving major accomplices, was sentenced to hanging, arrested and imprisoned in London.
On January 31, 1606, a few minutes before his execution began, he jumped off a ladder, climbed onto an overhanging platform, broke his neck, and died on the spot.
In 1606, Parliament designated November 5 as public Thanksgiving.
Today, Guy Fox Day is celebrated every year across the UK on 5 November to commemorate the gunpowder plot.
As night falls, villagers and city dwellers across England light bonfires, set off fireworks and burn portraits of Guy Fox to celebrate his failure to blow Parliament and James I toward the kingdom.